


Short Fanfics 2003-2013

by copperbadge



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, House M.D., Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drabbles, Multi, Shorts, many fandoms, many ships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-01-01
Updated: 2003-01-01
Packaged: 2017-12-29 10:18:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 36,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1004228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/copperbadge/pseuds/copperbadge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Drabbles and shortfics written between 2003 and 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Harry Potter: An Experience In Nakedness

**Author's Note:**

> Summary: Ten years of poverty is an experience in nakedness, in being slowly stripped of things like illusions and decent clothing.  
> Warnings: None.  
> Rating: G.

He considers with his hands folded on the table and his head on his hands. There's a chocolate bar on the table. Shiny. 

He used to want books, be hungry for books, save the pocket-money his parents gave him for books. But books are heavy, and he moves around a lot. They're expensive too, even second-hand, and after a while he can't bring himself to buy them anymore. Instead he memorises where the libraries are in every town he's lived in, and he knows about how useful each will be. He saw a gorgeous Modern Wizarding Library copy of The Tempest which would match the edition of Great Wizarding Short Stories that is one of the few books he does own; he thinks he still has time to own a house with bookshelves, and how nice they'd look on the bookshelf together, awaiting the addition of more books, the whole Modern Wizarding Library set, each in their neat brown dust jackets. 

He discovered after a time that the reason he could bring himself to turn down books like The Tempest is because it's not actually books he wants. It's knowledge. He wants to know things and learn things and experience things in books, but he doesn't need to own the books to do that. They're nice of course, and he likes the feel of thick, ink-imprinted paper, but that's a luxury. 

Ten years of poverty is an experience in nakedness, in being slowly stripped of things like illusions and decent clothing. He doesn't mind; it makes you strong. 

He used to have a ritual where he would make his purchase at the bookstore first, paying only in Galleons and never correct change; and then with all his accumulated change he'd buy chocolate in the sweets shop. He tried every kind of chocolate treat there was, methodically, even though Sirius laughed at him; he wanted to know precisely what was the best kind to eat, what gave best value for his handful of Sickles and Knuts.

He discovered after a time that it wasn't even taste, but texture that he liked, because nothing in the world quite has the same texture as chocolate. It wasn't that he didn't like the taste of it, he did, and he liked some more than others; it was like books, though. An added bonus.

And eventually he realised that he didn't even really care about knowledge or the texture of chocolate. They amounted to the same thing in the end, and that was because both of them were escapes. They were his drugs, his way of withdrawing from the world, and as they went they were pretty harmless; you couldn't go to a library and get free alcohol (at least, none of the libraries he'd ever been to, but if they were out there, sign him up), and most narcotics certainly cost more than most chocolate bars. 

Which is why he is considering the chocolate bar. He'd never really thought he had addictions before. Quite possibly the amount of time he spends in the library of Grimmauld Place is becoming dangerous.

"Hi Remus," Harry calls, as he passes through the dining room, followed by Ron. They're carrying a large contraption wrapped in a bedsheet, which Remus doesn't examine too closely; he finds it better not to ask what they get up to in their spare time, in case he finds out and has to call the Ministry about it. 

"Hello, lads," he says, leaning back and smiling. "Busy day?"

"Yep," Ron answers. "Dad's had Harry explaining Muggle things all morning."

"Sounds like fun."

"It is if you're dad."

"Are you eating that?" Harry asks, pointing to the chocolate. Remus glances at it, then picks it up and tosses it to Harry. The boy catches it easily out of the air; natural-born Seeker, that one. 

"Nah," he says. "Enjoy it."

"Ta, Remus," Harry answers over his shoulder, as they vanish into the hallway.

Remus smiles.


	2. Cats and Dogs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's hard to discipline Sirius Black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: PG-13 (Sirius/McGonagall)  
> Warnings: Student/Teacher dynamic.

Minerva McGonagall sighed.

It was hard to discipline Black. For one thing, he had developed what was admittedly quite an advanced morality by which he cheerfully underwent any punishment inflicted on him for any dark deed he'd been caught doing. And, in addition, if he hadn't actually done it, there was not a lever in the world big enough to shift the Immovable Sirius. At least it was a good way to gauge guilt, but it did make detentions difficult.

"Sirius," she said, leaning back on her desk, "What am I supposed to do with you?"

The young man looked utterly unrepentant, sprawled in one of the desk chairs, long legs stretched out before him, seventeen years' worth of defiance in his slouch. His arms were crossed over his broad chest, and his hair fell, against Hogwarts dress code, well into his eyes.

"The usual, I suppose," he said. "We did cleaning-the-toilets last time, I say this time you make me polish all the ground-floor portrait-frames. There must be at least a hundred of 'em."

"Allowing you to choose your own punishment negates the whole system," she said, his messy hair making her brush her own off her forehead. He smiled.

"Why punish me at all?"

"Because you've done something wrong, Sirius."

He waved a hand. "You know you enjoyed seeing me deck the Squid in faerie lights just as much as I enjoyed doing it."

She fought down a smile. It was true that it had been...amusing. 

Sirius sat up in his chair and then pushed himself to his feet. One hand stroked his scruffy chin, pondering, as he made his way to the front of the classroom.

"Don't you think punishments in general ought to at least entertain people as much as the crime did?" he asked.

"Merlin forbid you should ever become a teacher, Sirius Black."

He was close to her now -- when had he shot up so tall that they saw eye-to-eye? Soon he'd be taller than her, if he kept this up. 

"I don't see why my punishment shouldn't bring joy to others," he said, ducking his head a little. "I suppose you could always take it out of my hide, Professor."

"Take it out of your -- just what exactly do you mean by that, Mr. Black?" she asked. He lifted his face just enough for his electric blue eyes to meet hers. 

"Whatever pleases you, Professor," he said. She caught her breath. "I place myself in your hands entirely."

As if to contradict himself, one of his own hands drifted out to touch the collar of her robes, floating gently down until it rested on her hip, as if asking permission. 

"I think something might be arranged," she said, touching his wrist lightly. He grinned at her as his other hand slid up over her breasts, to loose the catch on the collar of her robes.

"I've been a very naughty boy, Professor," he said, and Minerva McGonagall laughed.

* * *

**White Which**

Narcissa was so fair that her father always doubted she was really his. He wouldn't make her heir; Bella teased her, made her believe when she was nine that she wasn't a Black at all.

Sirius found her crying behind the garden shed. He flopped down next to her and offered her a lolly. 

"Bellatrix says I'm not really a Black," she wept. "She says I'm a white witch."

Sirius pondered this.

"That mean anything?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"Well, what's a white witch? Doesn't mean anything. You can be a Black and not have black hair. S'not law," he said. 

She drew her small mouth up in a pout.

"I'll marry you," Sirius offered. "Then you'll def'nitely be a Black."

Her eyes brightened. "Promise?"

"Sure." 

But all that was a long time ago. Now Sirius looks on Draco, thirteen and asleep in his dormitory bed, and he does wonder.

"Remember," he whispers, "you were almost mine, white witch."

* * *

 **Dreamers**  
Prompt: _"Logic!" said the Professor half to himself. "Why don't they teach logic at these schools?"_

Tom Riddle was a logical boy, fascinated by anagrams and crosswords, things others thought were fripperies, a kind of mental disease. He learned magic in a sensible fashion, reducing each lesson to its component parts; he understood the formula for transfiguration rather than merely knowing how to turn doves into handkerchiefs. 

"Why don't they teach it this way?" he asked Dumbledore. "Why don't they teach technique?"

"These things take time, Tom," Dumbledore replied. "You can't change the world with a handclap."

"I could," Tom said. "If I had power I'd _make_ people change."

Dumbledore smiled gently. "What about the dreamers, Tom? Should they suffer your logic's chilly clasp too?"

"Not all of us find it cold," Tom answered.

_Severus Snape looked up at his tutor and smiled. "I understand now. Why don't they teach it this way at school?"_

_Tom put a hand on the young man's shoulder. "The world is too full of dreamers, Severus."_

**Show Me**

Prompt: May/December; [a photo of a field of Bluebonnets](http://pro.corbis.com/images/UL782727.jpg?size=67&uid=%7bd7602c18-0849-4a92-b5d3-bd3c17f8c065%7d).

After the war, his eyes changed colour. It wasn't contact lenses; he still wore glasses. Perhaps it was some sympathy with Sirius, or a rejection of green-eyed Tom Riddle. 

Remus came across him lying in a field of blue flowers down below Hogwarts; his eyes were blue now too -- he did look like Sirius as Remus sat and studied his upturned face. Harry propped himself on his elbows, smiling.

"Classes start tomorrow," Remus said. "Certain you want to stay?"

"Hogwarts was always my home. I'm looking forward to teaching."

"Me too."

"You're the Headmaster. I'll be asking you loads of questions."

"Oldest and youngest."

Before Remus could stop him one hand had taken him by the neck, pulling him down into a kiss that was sweet and hazed with blue, like Harry's eyes.

"So I suppose you'll show me, then?" Harry asked. 

Remus nodded slowly and sank down into the field, disappearing completely in the blue.


	3. Identifying Marks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After death, what is left but our identifying marks?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Multiple character deaths.  
> Rating: R for violence

One:

Calluses on palms and fingertips, both hands. Several long gouges, left shin, professionally healed. Torso, face, and left arm, series of bite-marks, jaw-width indicative of human, tooth pattern likely werewolf (overlarge incisors, reduced molars). 

_"I think it has to be the Weasley boy."_

_"What, the eldest?"_

_"Yeah. I remember someone saying once he looked like a pack of dogs set on him."_

_"Lovely wife, though."_

_"Wonder why she married him."_

Two:

Magical tattoo, left hip below waist, small kneazle curled around the letter R. Birthmark on left arm, approx. 3 cm in diameter.

_"Dental records?"_

_"No fillings, very straight teeth, evidence of orthodontia as a child."_

_"Any matches?"_

_"Probably Hermione Granger. Had Granger's wand in her hand."_

Three: 

Magical tattoo, bicep of left arm, crossed swords in front of the letter H. No obvious birthmarks. Evidence of broken bones indicating fall from a broomstick.

_"Found next to number two."_

_"Ron Weasley, I think. The tattoo."_

_"Christ, two Weasleys?"_

Four and Five:

Indistinguishable.

_"Four."_

Six: 

Evidence of extensive injuries sustained over several years. Innumerable long, straight scars, some professionally healed, some showing signs of former infection, indicating animal claws. Scars cover sides of torso, arms, legs, neck, and face. Several fractured and healed bones, most professionally set, some sustained in childhood. 

_"Jesus, what happened to him?"_

_"They're all old. Werewolf."_

_"Lupin?"_

_"Too young. One of the juveniles with him, probably. I'll ask around. Look, there's Lupin."_

Seven:

_"Do I have to document that?"_

_"Document everything."_

_"I don't think there's anyone who doesn't recognise that scar."_

_"Oh, everyone knows who he is. Document it anyway."_

Eight:

_"What the hell is that?"_

_"Don't know. Looks like some kind of cup. Look, you can almost make out an H on the side. Looks like someone tried to destroy it."_

_"Looks like they suceeded. Mind the dead snake."_


	4. Five More Words

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: None  
> Rating: PG

Sirius didn't fancy boys. He just fancied _everyone_. He enjoyed girls. And doing things with them. It was just that he had yet to meet a girl who could make him react the way a _dream_ about James could.

Not that he was interested in James. After all, he didn't fancy boys.

Which made it okay when Remus wrapped his mouth around Sirius' cock or slid hands down his chest or _fucked him_ because Remus didn't fancy boys either. If neither of them fancied boys then it wasn't anything, even if Remus sometimes whispered "I love you" in his ear (and he whispered it back.)

_sam: It's five words over limit so I think I will make the end a parenthetical. And then it will be like, poetic or something. You know. The bit he won't admit to himself because it's past the 100 mark._   
_jaida: Oooh. That is deep and meaningful._   
_sam: Wow, that was like a porny warmup. A pornup._   
_jaida: *pain*_   
_sam: Like a pinup, only not._


	5. Harry Potter Shortfic G-Rated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are all rated G, though they may contain a variety of 'ships.

**One Of A Kind**

"Can you really look like anyone?" Harry asked, the summer after his fifth year.

"With practice," Tonks answered. "It's not looking like a person that's the hard part. That's just..." she winced, and her nose shrank to a pert, pixieish snub. "That's just a trick, really. You can do the same with charms."

"So why is being a metamorphmagus special?" Harry asked.

"Because we're also mimics," she answered. "The key to being someone else is understanding their minds, their movements. Their voices. I don't understand you enough to imitate you, for example. I'd be wretched."

She grinned and touseled his hair. "You're one of a kind, Harry."

For the first time ever, Harry actually felt proud of that.

* * *

**Teach Us**

"Harry, you showed him?"

Fred stood in the doorway of Grimmauld Place, looking furious. The Marauder's Map was spread on a table and Harry and Remus had been looking at it, heads together, when they were interrupted.

"It's all right, Fred. I caught him with it," Remus answered. "I was just showing him some tricks you never found out about."

"What does he mean?" George asked, pushing past Fred into the room. "Never found out about? How'd you find them then, if you're so clever?"

"Didn't Harry tell you?" Remus asked.

"He's Moony," Harry said. Fred and George looked at each other.

"You?" they asked in unison. Remus gave them a beatific smile. 

"Would you lads like to sit in? You might learn something," he said gravely. Fred and George gave him the look usually reserved for new varieties of exploding breakfast pastry, and sat at his feet like disciples.

"Teach us," Fred said.

* * *

**Second Generation**

Ginny was drying dishes when it happened; standing at the window, watching for James' return. Harry, who'd been sitting lazily at the table, jumped when she shouted.

"James!" she shrieked, and ran for the yard.

When Harry caught up he found his wife staring at their son, being investigated by an enormous black dog, sniffing James' dark hair.

"James, come away," he ordered. 

"It's okay, dad," James beamed. "He's magic."

Harry stared at the dog, whose pale eyes fixed on his face.

Then where the dog had been, was a ragged man.

"Sirius?" Harry asked.

"I knew he was magic," James pronounced.

* * *

**Train**

It was unusually sunny, all things considered; normally the ride to Hogwarts was punctuated by storms. Instead, the window-blinds in the compartment were open, and sunlight streamed through -- turning Peter's hair gold, picking out coppery highlights in Remus'. James, long legs propped on a trunk they were using as a footrest, was reading "So You Want To Play Professional Quidditch". Their robes were piled carelessly next to him, and topped by a heaping helping of sweets and pasties from the snack cart.

Sirius, curled up on the seat between Remus and Peter, panted a little, and Peter idly offered him a bit of peppermint, which he crunched up in Padfoot's jaws easily, enjoying the candy all the more for his doggy senses. Remus, he thought, was probably asleep, and it was safe to rest his head on the boy's thigh, where it was most comfortable.

He froze for a minute when he felt Remus shift, but it was only to move slightly closer. Fingers stroked the short, bristling fur on his head, then dropped a little to scratch him in that itchy place just behind his ears.

Padfoot heaved an enormous, satisfied sigh, and heard Peter and James laugh. 

***

Remus was warm, for the first time in ages; it always seemed difficult, when he was away from Hogwarts, to feel anything but slightly-too-cold. But the sunlight filling their train compartment was soaking into his clothing, into his skin the way rain often did; he felt filled up with sunlight, and sleepy.

A weight on his thigh made him wake a little from his dozing, and he moved instinctively to accomodate the big, squarish doggy head; it had been a hard summer for Sirius, and he deserved the freedom to be Padfoot for a while. Remus liked the feel of Padfoot's fur under his fingers, especially just over his eyes, where it was short and spiky. He felt Padfoot's throat vibrate in an unheard whine, and moved his fingers back, to scratch him behind the ears.

When Padfoot sighed happily, James and Peter both burst out laughing. Remus felt responsible, somehow, for their laughter, and joy welled up inside him; he had made his friends happy, which was really all he ever wanted out of life.

* * *

**The Bookshelf**

It worried Jupiter Black. 

It wasn't natural, liking books. Boys were supposed to like Quidditch, Muggle-baiting, and hunting on the country estate. Instead, Sirius -- who should have been showing his younger brother how to catch fish and hex Muggles -- would just as soon spend an afternoon reading spellbooks. And not even useful ones. 

It had changed, a bit, when Sirius started Hogwarts; he got at least three letters a semester complaining of death-and-law-defying behaviour, and always sent the boy a treat as encouragement. 

The whole thing came to a head when the boy had done nothing all summer except read, even Muggle books, and had given one of them to Regulus, too. They had a furious row about it, and the next day Jupiter went into Sirius' room and destroyed his bookshelf, burning everything in it. Sirius threw himself on his father with a viciousness which surprised everyone, and by the time they pulled him off, he'd clawed him bloody. 

They never found out how he escaped the basement cell they locked him in, but by the time his father was sufficiently recovered to thrash him as he deserved, Sirius was gone.

***

"We didn't know who to call," Miriam Potter said. "Clearly his family was out of the question."

"You did well," replied Andromeda Tonks. "I hope Sirius hasn't been a bother."

"Not in the least," Miriam smiled fondly. Andromeda, sitting at the kitchen table, could see Nymphadora through the window, playing in the Potters' gladiolis. Her cousin brooded on the step, tousel-haired James Potter nearby. 

"He won't eat," Miriam added. "He...says he's having trouble reading, can't see the words. We're happy to care for him, but I'm worried."

"He's better off here."

"No doubt, but what's to be done?"

Andromeda watched Nymphadora flop down next to Sirius, digging in her backpack for a book. She held it up, imploringly, and Sirius looked at it as if he'd never seen one before. James nudged him, and Nymphadora turned to the bookmark. Sirius closed the book; James and Nymphadora forced it open again.

She heard him begin to read, haltingly, as if he were just learning how. Nymphadora turned her face up to his, adoringly. 

"Take him a sandwich, in half an hour," Andromeda advised. "In the meantime, you must give me the recipe for these biscuits..."

* * *

**Not-Godfather**

Nobody would believe what Neville remembered, but it was true. It wasn't a flash and a pain in his head like Harry had, but it meant no less to him.

"I'm leaving England," said the brown-haired man. "I've sold my things."

"Understandable," said Gran, properly. 

"I knew Frank and Alice..." here he faltered. "They wanted to make me his godfather, but I wouldn't let them -- you're better for the boy."

"Undoubtedly."

"I haven't much cash, but I thought..." he held out a package. "May I...give him this?"

His gran, he remembered, had been about to say no, when the brown-haired man said "Please."

Neville was not allowed to bring the train to school with him, but he brought the small locomotive, and kept it in his pocket; it made him feel safe. When he saw Professor Lupin, third year, he didn't recognise him -- until he saw his smile when Neville was caught toying with the engine one morning, during breakfast. Then he remembered why the voice in his ear had sounded so reassuring, the first day of class, and why he instinctively trusted his not-godfather, when he'd cast some of his best hexes. 

***

Remus was furious, arriving home; furious at Britain, the world, the Wizarding world especially, and Neville Longbottom's grandmother in particular. He had gone to see the boy because his parents were locked up in St. Mungo's, and she had sat there and made tea and reprimanded the lad for tearing the paper off the gift Remus had brought him, because Remus had known not only Dead James and Lily and Dead Peter and Horrible Murderer Sirius but Insane Frank and Alice and if he lost anyone else he was going to go mad -- 

He threw his keys on the table, leaving the door open. Damn them all, for leaving him here, damn the lycanthropy that kept him from holding a steady job or taking Neville from that horrible old woman, damn himself for not knowing --

The crash terrified him, and he realised he'd hurled a china cat once given to him by Sirius as a joke into the glass-fronted bookshelf in his living room, shattering both. 

He sank down to the floor, willing this unwanted hatred out of his body physically, pressing both fists into his stomach.

He had never desired the full moon before.

* * *

**Ferret**

Remus scratched his head, staring at the small creature in the cage.

"I don't know, Harry," he said finally. "It's a bit small, isn't it? I mean, what about your father? Or even Sirius?"

Harry shook his head resolutely. "Small is good. I couldn't...not a dog. Not after Sirius. And a stag's too big."

"Yes, it was rather noticeable," Remus murmured in agreement. "Are you sure about this? It's not easy, you know. Took James and Sirius three years, nearly. I'm not going to be much help."

"I'm sure," Harry answered. "I want to be an animagus. Professor McGonagall's going to help, too."

"Can I ask why this particular creature?" Remus inquired, as Harry purchased the ferret whose fur he would need for the Animagus transformation. Harry grinned.

"Cos I can't wait to see what Draco does when a ferret starts following him everywhere," he replied. 

***

"I only need one ingredient," Harry pestered, following Snape through the Potions classroom. "I know you know where to get it."

"Powdered clotnail is illegal in this country," Snape replied sharply. 

"Other registered animagi have used it!"

"It wasn't illegal, thirty years ago, and no legal animagus has since completed the spell." 

"You know where I can get some," Harry insisted.

"Why should I help you destroy yourself when I've spent six years preventing it? This isn't a game! People have died!" 

Harry gave him a dull look. "So you won't allow me the one thing I need, to finish. The catalyst."

Snape growled. "If you bring ruin upon yourself by inspecting the second jar to the left, over my bookshelf, I cannot be held responsible."

Four days later, a black ferret came nosing into Snape's office, and climbed the wooden desk, curling itself up warily near his inkpot. 

Snape sighed. "Potter, if you continue to exceed my expectations thus, you may even one day make something of yourself."

He ignored the smug squeak when he stroked the sleek furry head, before returning to his work.

* * *

**Minister**

It was so quiet, these days.

Not that it had been less quiet, during Voldemort's second rise, but there had been an urgency which was now replaced by serene silence. They had buried the dead; the Death Eaters had taken worse injury, but the Order had, he felt, lost more. Sirius first, and so many others -- 

Remus was well used to surviving. 

And this was not so bad a survival; a pension from the Ministry, small but sufficient, and a comfortable flat, enough food to eat, heat in the winter. 

He had his habits, too, like tea. It was the ritual that counted; loose-leaf in a strainer, kettle on the stove, heated by gas and not magic. His overlarge mug, honey in the bottom, hot water poured over the strainer, stirred and sipped, adjusted as needed. 

The Prophet arrived through his kitchen window, flung by a delivery owl, and he picked it up, unfolding it as he held the tea to his lips to sip. 

He read the headline, and for the first and last time in his life did a tremendous spit-take, spilling tea all over himself.

SEVERUS SNAPE APPOINTED NEW MINISTER OF MAGIC, it read.

* * *

**Minister II**

Severus Snape sat back in the lush leather chair of the Minister of Magic, steepled his fingers, and smiled smugly. 

He was a Slytherin, and above all, Slytherins were ambitious. Slytherins delighted in being victorious over other ambitious Slytherins, which was why this moment was so delicious. 

Lucius and Draco Malfoy stood before him in chains.

"The pair of you have been found guilty of serial murder, Muggle-torture, and matricide," he said, meeting Draco's defiant gaze. "All done by fair and impartial jury."

They didn't speak. 

"You have been sentenced to imprisonment in Azkaban, which I may say is not what it once was, considering the destruction of the Dementors."

"I'd rather die," Draco snarled.

"Would you?" Snape asked. "Then we, Draco, are in agreement."

Lucius lifted his head, slowly.

"Must I beg for my son's life?" he asked hoarsely. "Now that you have the power you wished for, Severus?"

Snape shook his head. "Power, Lucius? Your master had power." He put his hands palm-down on his desk. "But you will remember for the rest of your days that I control every element of your existence."

"Why are we here?" Lucius asked. Snape smiled again, and didn't reply.

* * *

**The Toast**

"Last one standing," Sirius used to say, in the darker days of the last war. Morbid humour was his specialty, and that saying always made the other three grin; they'd raise their glasses and toast to the luck of the last one standing if they didn't all make it out alive. 

It was dark here, far away from the rest of the mad grapple that was going on in Diagon Alley, closer to a riot than an epic Final Battle. 

Remus raised his wand. Peter had lost his in the shadows somewhere.

"Last one standing," he said, and then, "Avada Kedavra."

* * *

**Cherry Blossom**

Come walking with me," Professor Lupin said. "I want to show you something."

Harry came obediently down the stairs, where he'd stopped when his name was called. They were the only ones in the hall; he'd left dinner late, and Professor Lupin hadn't been at dinner at all.

"I'm told walking is good for me," Professor Lupin said, as he limped, cane-in-hand, down the dirt path. "I try to do it as often as I can, but it is...difficult to do as we are told, sometimes."

Harry followed him in silence, grasping for questions to ask or comments to make. He wanted Professor Lupin to think he was smart, as smart as his father, and he wanted Professor Lupin to like him, but sometimes he didn't know how to say it. 

Lupin stopped on the trail, just before a bend that the students weren't supposed to follow, and turned awkwardly, unsteadily.

"Give me your arm, Harry, and close your eyes," he said gently.

"Why?" Harry asked.

"I need to know if you're ready for your Patronus lessons. If you're willing to trust me. Give me your arm."

Harry obeyed, shutting his eyes against the gloomy glow of the forest. He could feel Professor Lupin leading him down the path, the one less-trod because it was forbidden, and listened to the murmured directions -- mind the dip there, step over the stray rock, don't stumble on the gravel patch.

Finally, they stopped.

"Well done, Harry. You can look now."

Harry opened his eyes on a world of white, blossom petals blowing across a clearing in the forest, and an early-blooming cherry tree at the centre of it. 

"Perpetual bloom," Professor Lupin said. "It was planted and charmed centuries ago."

Harry moved forward, touching a blossom, which fell away from the tree on contact. 

"Your father found it," Lupin continued, and Harry glanced back at him. "It was his favourite place to study."

Harry saw his professor swallow, and looked away. In this place, stretching to touch a blossom, with his father's dark hair, it must be a great sacrifice for his professor.

It was hard, he knew, to see green eyes in James Potter's face.

* * *

**The Wake**

"Most wakes, the bar's in one corner and the body's in the other."

Harry glanced up from the drinks table, where nobody was monitoring even what Ginny drank, and saw Remus, leaning over to collect a pint glass and a bottle of butterbeer.

"I was all for a casket," Remus continued, "But Dumbledore felt it would be morbid."

"Wouldn't it?" Harry asked.

"A concrete symbol of loss? No, I think it would be apt. No body, no casket, no headstone, no healing. At least with your parents there were bodies."

Harry sucked in an involuntary breath. Remus studied him.

"Sixteen's a very trying time," he said finally. "Would you prefer I treat you like a child, Harry, or like a man?"

Harry looked away. "Which do you think I am?"

"I'm speaking to you as a man. Do me the same favour, and answer my question."

Harry nodded. "I'd rather you treated me like a grown-up."

"Then come with me."

Nobody noticed Remus and Harry slipping out the back-door of the house on Grimmauld Place, or if they did, nobody stopped them. Remus led him across the small back garden, and to Harry's surprise, put his hands in two gaps in the fence and scaled it easily. 

"Come on then," he said, and Harry followed as Remus dropped to the other side.

There was a sort of alley here, between the back fence of the Grimmauld Place house and the back fence of the garden which faced it. Remus pointed to a handful of score-marks high in the boards; SAPB, RJL, JHP, PMP, and in small letters below JHP, both sets of initials surrounded by a heart, LME. 

"We used to meet Sirius back here for a smoke some summers, when his family got to be too much. I couldn't go on the grounds -- they were warded against werewolves for a long time. That's your father, and there's Lily; Peter, of course, Sirius -- Sirius Aedelbert Pur Black -- and me."

As Harry drew closer, he could see there were scratches through his parents' names, through PMP.

"As they died I scratched their names out," Remus said softly.

A penknife, blade open, appeared in his palm, and he held it out to Harry.

"No body, no marker, no casket, no closure," Remus said. "And you have a life ahead of you, Harry."

Harry paused and studied his old teacher's face, then took the knife from his palm.

* * *

**Class Reunion**

"Do you realise," Remus Lupin said at dinner one night, as though it were nothing at all to be saying this in front of the whole school even if only Severus could hear, "That we're the only men left of our year's houses?"

"Nonsense," Severus grunted. "There must've been -- "

"Six Gryffindors, five Slytherin. Three of yours dead in the war, two of mine likewise. A heart attack, a suicide, and a broomstick fall."

Severus considered. He didn't care if this was Lupin's way of reaching out; he did not want to be reached-out-to.

"There's always Black," he said.

Remus didn't speak again.

* * *

**Italy**

"Where will you go when it's over?" Regulus asked him once, after they were out of school and before everything went to merry hell. "Would you like to go live somewhere away from here?"

"I can't afford to," Snape had replied from the desk where he was writing his report for Dumbledore. He was out, or would be soon, out of the hell that was this job, this calling; he could bring Regulus away from the Death Eaters with him when he left. It was unsafe even now; Regulus was too loud, too opinionated, too highly-bred to simply follow orders. 

"I'll take you somewhere, I've scads of money," Regulus answered. "Italy. I'll take you to Italy. You'll like it; it's warm there."

Severus stood on the shores, facing the sea, and said as he buried Regulus' Hogwarts signet ring in the sand, "Ti ho portato qui, dopo tutto."

* * *

**Just Like**

He found the book in the library while he was looking for school year-books, and it was like finding chocolate while looking for a box of raisins.

Draco cracked open the textbook, scrawled all over the cover with "Property of Sirius Black Esq." and "Fecking hands off, Snivellus" and similarly crude threats. There were one or two hexes but nothing a clever third-year who really did like Defence Against the Dark Arts couldn't break.

He'd wanted to find out all he could about Sirius as soon as he'd first heard of him when Lucius mentioned the prison-break and Narcissa began to rant about her cousin. Draco devoured the little ratty textbook whole, every note in the margins, every thumbprint-smear on old ink, every scrap of parchment bookmark, some with obscure notes like Moony is a Wanker - Fuck You Sirius Am Not, some with strange spells he'd never seen before on them. 

His cousin, Sirius Black, Voldemort's right hand. Draco had dreams about him, aspired to be like him, the only man to seriously screw Muggle-lovers and get out of Azkaban. Christmas holiday he wished he could find Black and make him take him away somewhere, the two of them on a spree together. It would beat his family's chilly silences, anyway.

Draco didn't believe Sirius doublecrossed Voldemort; Draco believed Sirius Black was a hero. Draco wanted to kill Potter for being his godson when he, Draco Malfoy, Sirius' own cousin's son and the next in line for the Black fortunes after him -- he should have that honoured place! Him, Draco Malfoy, someone who admired and wanted to be like Sirius Black!

He slept with the book under his pillow at night, and dreamed great dreams of one day being 

just 

like 

Sirius 

Black.

* * *

**Second Test**

"And will it work?"

For all his research, the young Healer hadn't bothered to answer that question while discussing the procedure.

"It should," he said hesitantly. Remus Lupin's unusually keen eyes pinned him to his chair.

"Should or will?"

"Will, if I'm the one doing it."

Lupin looked down again at the testing information, the Muggle chemical reports, the Healer records. Augustus Pye waited while he read each page delicately, as though what Pye had told him needed to be verified. Perhaps it did; certainly Pye couldn't be the first person to try and sell a werewolf snake-oil.

"I worry about these numbers," Lupin said. "The thaumatic drop."

"Yes, but I think that can be accounted for."

"Do you? Have you studied the Harris report?"

Pye blinked. "You've read the Harris report?"

"I've read everything there is to read on werewolves, Augustus," Remus said. "Including things I oughtn't to have. So you think the risk is negligible?"

"I wouldn't say negligible," Pye said honestly. "But I do think it's an even chance."

Lupin laughed softly. "An even chance."

"I think the reward is worth the risk."

"Losing my magic to lose my lycanthropy?" Lupin raised an eyebrow. "That's a lot to say for someone who's not a werewolf."

"Anymore."

Remus looked up sharply. Pye smiled.

"You didn't think I'd make you the first test subject, did you?" he asked, rolling up one sleeve. A wide crescent-shaped scar criscrossed the inside of his forearm. 

Lupin stacked the papers neatly and thoughtfully, and sighed. 

"All right, Augustus," he said quietly. "Tomorrow at sunset?"

"I'll be there," Pye agreed with a grin.

* * *

**A Question of Paternity**

"It's not true."

Dumbledore frowned. "I'm afraid it is. I cannot fault the House Elves for not speaking sooner; they were bound to secrecy."

The dark-haired man winced. "I don't believe it. I won't."

"You look a great deal like your father," Dumbledore continued. "But you must understand that he wasn't blood-related to the Snapes. I doubt we'll discover why he was given to the Snapes and not kept by -- "

"Don't say it."

"The documentation is here," Dumbledore tapped the scroll. "By rights, you are a son of the house."

"I am Severus...Black?"

* * *

**Inheritance**

It came as no surprise to Lupin, as it had to Sirius, that Mrs. Black's will left everything to her son. 

After all, the resurrected Voldemort rewarded those who went to Azkaban, those who had suffered. In the horrible days after Voldemort's fall, Sirius' parents had publicly declared that they were proud of their son, for doing what he believed in, for standing up against repressive Ministry orders. They had welcomed him very nearly posthumously back into the fold. They rewarded their boy for his...innocence. 

Sirius found it all very ironic. His parents, finally, were proud of their son.

* * *

**Defence Professor**

"What do I get him for Christmas?" Sirius asked. 

Remus shrugged. "He's your godson." 

"What does he like, you suppose?" 

Remus pondered. "Dark Arts," he said. "He liked Defence. And now he's teaching it and all." 

"What does a Defence professor need?" Sirius asked. 

"His head examined," Remus replied reservedly.


	6. Harry Potter Shortfic PG-Rated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are all rated PG; they encompass a wide variety of ships and some mature themes.

**There's You**

She found him in the library, at the far end near the windows that looked out onto the Quidditch pitch, with a small cauldron bubbling from a heating charm in front of him, and a roll of bandages next to his hand. 

Severus was like a cat in many ways -- easily frighted into lashing out, solitary, and preferring to find somewhere quiet to lick his wounds. Minerva McGonagall understood the feeling all too well, so she merely did what she would have done with a cat -- sat quietly, and waited for him to make the first move.

"There was a skirmish with the Order," he said, calmly, stirring the cauldron with his left hand. His right was cut to ribbons. "I wasn't recognised. Lucius Malfoy got off one good hex before I could escape."

"You could ask Pomona."

"It's a simple salve," he said, and as if to prove his words, dipped his fingers in the cauldron and began spreading the concotion on his injured hand. She picked up the bandages. 

"It's dangerous, Severus."

"No one ever said it wasn't."

She held out the bandages, and he looked perplexed for a moment, as if pondering how to one-handedly use them. Finally she smiled, and began to wrap his hand for him.

"There are others, you know, whom you can depend on."

"There's you."

She smiled as she tore the bandage and tucked the loose end away. "Yes, Severus. There is me. Go get some rest -- I'll cover this afternoon's classes."

She stood to go, allowing him to clean up the cauldron and bandages on his own, when he stopped her.

"Thank you, Minerva," he said quietly. 

"You're welcome," she answered, and smiled, and left.

* * *

**London**

It wasn't as though he had anywhere to go.

The little ticket office at the Hogsmeade station was open, and Remus stood there with his luggage, considering. The news had already spread through the town; the ticket agent had terror in his eyes. The porter clearly wouldn't help him with his things, although he was still walking with a limp. 

"How far will this take me?" he asked, dropping a handful of Sickles and Galleons onto the counter of the ticket office. The man looked as though he didn't want to touch them.

"London," came the stammered answer. Remus sighed. 

Suddenly, something cold and wet poked his hand. He glanced down. A giant newfoundland dog was standing at his hip, licking his fingers. 

There are airplanes in London. Ships. We could go anywhere.

There are beds in London, quiet places we could be together -- 

He rubbed Padfoot behind the ears.

"London, then," he said.

* * *

**Understand**

"I am not reformed," Snape snarled. Albus Dumbledore looked taken-aback, which was an unusual expression on the elderly wizard. 

"I apologise, Severus, I merely meant -- "

"I know what you meant," Snape interrupted. "I am not interested in rehabilitating young Malfoy or anyone else. I don't understand their pain and don't wish to."

"You underwent a similar transition, however."

"No. Although it's clear you don't understand either of us," Snape replied, crossing his arms and pacing the office carpet. "This isn't about you or the Order. It never was. It was about the side which wouldn't leave the world in ruins. I like security. I like my rooms, my routines, my solitude. This isn't good versus evil. It's merely security versus anarchy."

Dumbledore was silent. 

"Find idealists to handle your reformed idealists," Snape finished. "Leave me to my duties, and send me the vicious ones, the frightened ones, when they come to you. They're the ones I'll understand."

* * *

**Scaredy Cat**

"Neville?"

Ginny stumbled into the dark room in the upstairs at Grimmauld Place, unsure whether Neville was even here. Remus said he was lurking upstairs somewhere, but everyone was rather at loose ends; Voldemort's challenge had come and Harry had accepted, and tomorrow it would be ended, one way or another.

"I'm here, Ginny," Neville replied, and a shadow detached itself from the others, moving forward. Neville's growth spurt had turned him into a tall, gangling young man, no less clumsy than ever, but with the promise of grace in a few years of practice.

"How are you?"

"Scared."

"Nobody else is."

"I used to think that," Neville said thoughfully. "Now I just think they won't admit it."

Ginny stood still, twisting her fingers together anxiously.

"I'm scared," she admitted. Neville smiled.

"I know," he said, and leaned forward and kissed her. She stared up at him in shock.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because being scared of kissing the girl I love seems silly in the face of being scared of death," he answered. 

"Love...?"

He shrugged. "You had to know sooner or later."

Ginny smiled, and leaned against his chest. One of his hands smoothed her red hair.

"Scaredy-cat," she said.

"Yes, but your scaredy-cat," he replied.

* * *

**How It Feels**

"Do you like it?"

Sirius was so hopeful that Christmas, so desperate to know whether he'd done something right, finally. It was a relief to tell him he had; Harry took positive joy, not only in the book he'd gotten as a gift from his godfather and his former professor, but in telling Sirius how great it was. 

"I bet Remus picked it out, though," he teased, grinning as he paged through it. Sirius, sitting on the end of the sofa nearest Harry's chair, made a wry face.

"I can't like books?" he asked. 

"Sure you can," Harry replied. "But you'd have given me something a lot more dangerous if you had your way. You did pick it out, didn't you, Remus?"

Remus, engrossed in his own book and sitting on the far end of the couch, glanced up. "Hmm?"

Sirius laughed and reached out, touseling the other man's already-untidy brown hair with one large, long-fingered hand. He said something, and Remus replied, but Harry didn't hear them; he was suddenly caught up in what he saw on Remus' face. 

Not amusement, not even perplexed tolerance, which Harry would have expected; instead his smile was achingly open, innocent and ingenuous and...adoring. As if Sirius had invented the world and given it to Remus Lupin as a gift. It was how his father looked at his mother in the photographs in Harry's album. Raw, vulnerable love. 

Whatever else had been between the two of them, whatever else still was, it didn't stand up for a heartbeat to what he saw on Remus' face. 

Then Remus inclined his head a little as he said something else. He glanced at Harry, and Sirius followed his gaze.

And now it was as if, having been given the world, they couldn't wait to share it with him.

This is how it feels, Harry thought, to be loved.

* * *

**Because**

Because the best thing was watching him lose control.

Because everything Remus did was precise, from picking up a book to a curse he was teaching Bill. Because his eyes never strayed, he never said a word without thinking first, and his hands never drummed impatiently.

Because he could be caught off-guard, but only in an unexpected moment, if he had to react to something, like Mrs. Black's portrait, or a falling coat-tree. 

Because she thought he was marvelous.

Tonks was clumsy because she liked to see him panic a little, and when she kissed him, he made a quiet, hungry noise that said he trusted her completely.

* * *

**Screwup**

Slytherin lost. Again. 

Harry said some rather nasty things.

It wasn't unusual; he was just giving as good as he'd gotten, but it stung anyway. Maybe because Harry'd said them in front of Ginny Weasley, who had the unnerving habit of looking through a man and making him wonder if he didn't have a soul after all. 

"Go on," he said, as Ginny lingered nearby. He bowed his head. "You heard Potter. I'm just a screwup, you don't want to associate with me."

"Chicks dig screwups," Ginny said, and kissed him.

She was gone before he could recover.

"Screwup," he muttered.

* * *

**Smarts**

"That's going to smart tomorrow."

Draco looked up from bandaging his hand, calmly. He would've sneered if it'd been a student; one didn't sneer at Professor Snape.

"Dare I ask what it was this time?" Snape said quietly. 

"Charm gone wrong," Draco answered, tightly.

"You've never done well in Charms."

Draco bit the end of the bandage and tucked it under, wincing. 

"I think at this point it's safe to say I've never done well in anything, have I?"

Snape tilted his head. "I thought Malfoys were above self-pity."

"Do you disagree?"

"No."

"We're certainly above others' pity," Draco answered. "Did you want something, Professor?"

"Do you understand why you are about to fail seventh year?"

"I was a stupid little shit who never did any work the first six?"

Snape's lips curved upwards. "Well done, Mister Malfoy. And that," he added, "is going to smart most of all."

* * *

**France**

"Why does it smell like France in here?"

Remus looked up from where he was bent over the kitchen counter, and wrinkled his nose. "How do you know how France smells?"

"What on earth are you cooking?"

"I mean, as a whole, France would probably smell sort of awful, I think most countries out there would, like dirt and rivers and lots of cigarettes..."

"Lupin."

"Baked brie, not that it's any of your business."

"Where did you learn to bake brie?"

"Bugger off, it's mine."

Snape sat down defiantly at the kitchen table. "It smells like Paris," he amended. "When I stayed there after the Dark Lord's fall."

Remus paused, and turned. Beyond him, now, Snape could see baguette, and hummus, and -- some sort of chocolate confection, apparently fresh from the chill-charmed cupboard.

"You stayed in Paris?" he asked.

"I was sent there to wait until the trials were over. Interrupted my teaching, but only for a month or two. The trials were -- "

" -- quick," Remus said, almost wistfully. 

"Where did all this food come from?" 

Remus smiled. "Harry. He said Sirius would have wanted me to have some of the inheritance, and I'm in charge of the trust until he's seventeen. I thought he might like some...different sort of food." 

He flicked his wand at the oven, and something smelling of warm baked pastry floated out. 

"You could have some, if you wanted," Remus said casually.

"I should probably make sure it's edible at all," Snape grumbled, as a plate of pastry and warm, oozing cheese was set in front of him. He picked up a fork and broke off some of it, eating carefully, mindful not to burn his tongue.

"It's not bad," he allowed. Remus smiled, and bent to slicing the baguette again. His voice was conversational, but there was that wistfulness in it again.

"I've never been to Paris," he said.

* * *

**Something You Ought To Know**

"There's something you ought to know."

Bent over in his chair, face in his hands, working at keeping things under control harder than he had in years, Remus Lupin was fresh from the private memorial and in no mood to play games. "If you've come to taunt me -- "

"Whatever your opinion of me may be, you ought to think better than that," Snape said, icily.

"You tried to get him killed once, and almost succeded."

"Tit for tat."

"Damn you," Remus snarled, looking up. "Damn you to hell, Severus. He was sixteen. You were thirty-three."

Snape drew himself up for a retort, but a low, wordless growl brought him back to his senses. 

"Be that as it may, there is still something you should know."

"What's that? What information could possibly be so important that it would bring the great moralist Severus Snape down to the level of us fallible mortals?"

"He never suspected you. During the first war."

Remus stared at him. Snape tapped his temple.

"He was never good at hiding anything. He never had to. I am very good at hearing things, on the other hand. He never thought you were the turncoat."

"He wouldn't lie to me."

"He did. He was afraid. He would have died for your precious James Potter, but he was afraid to keep his secret. Pettigrew was too dim to be afraid, too stupid to be treacherous."

"We thought," whispered Remus. "We always thought that about him..."

"So I heard in his thoughts, his dreams."

"When he was so angry, ready to kill Peter -- " realisation began to dawn in his eyes. "It was because he hated himself for his own fear..."

"And you," Snape said, "were too precious."

Remus stared at him, open-mouthed.

"He could not have risked you," Snape said quietly. "If you believe nothing else I have ever said, you ought to believe that."

The other man bent his head again, and rubbed his knuckles against his eyes.

"And is this supposed to comfort me?" he asked softly.

* * *

**Come Home To Me**

_He said Please come to Boston,_   
_She said No --_   
_Boy, won't you come home to me?_   
\-- D.A. Loggins

"Would you go back to teaching, if you could?" Tonks asked, setting the tea in front of him. He touched the rim, thoughtfully.

"In a heartbeat," Remus answered.

She smiled. "Even if everyone knew you were a werewolf?"

"Everyone does."

"Would you come with me, if I went?"

He looked up. She gazed into her teacup.

"Dumbledore's offered me the job," she said. "But I wouldn't go unless you could come too."

"Why?" he asked. "It's not as though we're invol -- "

He never got to finish, because she kissed him.

"Oh," he said, when she was done.

"Would you come to Hogwarts, if I went?" she asked again.

"In a heartbeat," he answered.

* * *

**Dragon Slayer**

They came around every once in a while. More often now that he was Out, of course, since being publicly a werewolf did tend to draw attention. Still, it was never very troubling, and you met really the most interesting people.

This one was whimpering in the corner over the wrist Remus had handily snapped while avoiding the long silver dagger clenched in one hand. Remus calmly tapped the teakettle, and set out two cups.

"Milk?" he asked. The man groaned. "Do stop being a sissy, no one's ever going to respect you if you cry every time a little bone breaks. Bring it here, then, and I'll fix it."

The man looked up at him with mistrustful eyes, but held out his arm. Remus prodded it with his wand and muttered a few words.

"There you are then," he said kindly, as the bones knit. "Did you say you wanted milk?"

"Yes please," the man muttered. Remus added milk to one of the cups of tea, and lemon to the other, and sat at the table. He sipped calmly.

"Now, I'm sure we can reach an understanding. I am clearly not a danger to any village anywhere, and really if you kill me you won't get half the glory you'd get for killing something really interesting, like a rogue dragon."

"Dragons," the man grunted. 

"Yes; you rarely hear epics about anyone who merely killed werewolves. Vampires get exponentially more respect, but dragons are really where it's at, I've heard," Remus said. "And I'm sure if you knew me you'd never dream of trying to murder me. I'm fairly likeable, as people go."

The man drank his tea sullenly, while Remus discussed the finer points of heroic monster-killing a la Beowulf and St. George, and then sent him on his merry way.

"Really, must they all go after werewolves?" he sighed. "Van Helsing complex, the lot of them. Slayer of Lycans indeed. Ah well..."


	7. Harry Potter Shortfic PG-13 and R

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are rated PG-13 and R. They encompass a wide variety of ships and adult themes including adultery, transgenerational, multiple-partner, and teacher/student relationships.

**Detention**

The potions weren't aphrodesiac potions, even.

They were healing salves, advanced in some ways, which was appropriate since it was the final year of NEWTs studies, after all. It must have been the fumes that made Harry's head spin, since it was only when he and Ron were working on their potions, alone in the seventh-year Potions classroom, that he felt this way.

The only time he was alone with Ron, in fact. 

"Does this make you dizzy?" Ron asked, bent over the cauldron one evening.

"A little," Harry said.

"It's not supposed to."

"No."

"Do I make you dizzy?"

Harry was quiet. 

"Cos I think you do," Ron said. "Make me, I mean."

Snape docked them almost a full letter grade for carelessly spilling their salves. He probably would have tried to have them thrown out of school if he knew it was because Harry was pinning Ron to the workbench, kissing him fiercely while Ron's fingers unbuttoned Harry's shirt...

* * *

**Letters**

"Owl post for you," Sirius said, tossing a handful of letters across the common room. He always managed it without any of them going astray, which Remus (along with most of the Gryffindor boys) admired; he caught them, which he was unaware that a good proportion of the Gryffindor girls were impressed by, and opened the top one.

Sirius watched as Remus blushed, starting from the tips of his ears and spreading down over his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose.

"Interesting letter?" he asked. 

"I think I'm going to read my letters in private," Remus answered, running up the stairs to their dormitory. Sirius gave him until the count of sixty before following. 

"Did you like my letter?" he asked, sliding his arm around the alread-naked Remus and tossing a locking charm in the general vicinity of the door. Remus moaned, softly. 

"You are filthy," he replied.

"I like sending you letters," Sirius said with a grin, and got on with one of the several extremely obscene acts he had just been detailing in a letter to someone...

* * *

**Instinct to Run**

She found him on the stairs, holding a toy in his hands, turning it over and over, idly. She sat down next to him, patient.

"It's Ginny's," Remus said. "Arthur gave it to her. Muggle astronauts went to the moon in a spaceship, you know."

"I always thought it was a little foolish, trying to get all the way to the moon when we ought to be solving a few problems on Earth first," Minerva answered. "But then I guess our first instinct is always to run."

"Mine is," he said. 

"Mine too. It's hard to stand and fight."

They sat in silence for a little while.

"You can't stand up, can you," she asked.

"The moon last night. I'm just sore. Another few minutes and I'll be fine. I wanted to take Ginny's rocket back to her, she forgot it in my room when she came up to borrow a book."

She wrapped one arm around his waist and helped him to his feet, surprisingly sturdy. He stumbled and almost fell, but she caught him; the rocketship clattered to the floor. 

"Sorry," he said. "I'm awkward around you, you know."

"I know," she answered, and he kissed her impulsively, unbalancing them a second time, and this time only the banister saved them. 

"I could take her toy back to her later," he said, against her cheek.

"Let me help you back to your room," she answered. "She'll find it on the stairs. Hard to miss, after all."

* * *

**Anniversary**

"Neville?"

Harry propped himself on his elbows and looked across the room, to where Neville had entered carefully carrying a large tray and a stuffed sack on one shoulder. He'd grown up a bit this past year -- chubby clumsiness had turned to a lean sort of grace, though he was just as forgetful as ever, and still fumbled in Potions.

"What's that?" Harry asked, as Neville set the tray down on the stove in the centre of the room -- which had been turned off in April when the weather grew fine. All the rest of the Gryffindor boys were out at Hogsmeade, but Harry had stayed behind to study plays -- there were going to be Quidditch scouts at the cup this year, and even if he WAS only a sixth year, well, Fred and George hadn't had their NEWTs, and they were doing just fine. 

"I brought cake and hats," Neville said calmly.

"Yes, but WHY?" Harry asked, as Neville gave him a spangly top hat to wear. Neville carried the cake to Harry's bed, and sat crosslegged on it.

"Well. I reckon soon enough we'll have another epic battle or something," Neville said, "and it always happens in June. And we both know you're going to beat him -- "

" -- Neville -- "

"And I know it's hard," Neville continued almost wretchedly. "So I thought I'd cheer you up a bit."

Harry looked down at the cake. "Happy Anniversary," he read. "Anniversary of what?"

"Voldemort's defeat."

"But he hasn't been defeated yet!"

Neville looked down. "But he will be. Pre-emptive, sort of thing. And I figure if we celebrate it on June first we have to ALWAYS, and it's easy to remember."

Harry stared at the cake for a while. "You're weird."

"Yeah, I know."

"You're weird like Dumbledore's weird."

Neville beamed. "Thanks."

Harry grinned back. Neville, with the air of someone greatly daring, swiped some of the frosting off the cake and wiped it on the tip of Harry's nose. Harry laughed and tried to lick it off, then gave up -- 

Just as Neville leaned across the cake and did it for him.

And of course it was the most natural thing in the world to tilt his head a little so that the tongue which still had icing sugar on it was in his mouth.

"I like this anniversary," Harry said.

* * *

**Taking The Blame**

"I know you're there, whoever you are!" Coach's voice echoed in the damp room. Remus crouched behind a bank of lockers, naked, shivering. He could see them from here; coach flushed and angry, Sirius trying to preserve his decency without making any sudden moves.

"Don't think you'll hide!" the coach continued. "I'm giving you one chance to own up!"

Remus, realising that it was futile to hide, began to stand --

And heard footsteps, coming his way.

Lily Evans, head high, shirt missing, skirt unbuttoned, walked past him.

"Me, sir," she said. Sirius looked stunned.

***

"Why'd you do that?" Sirius asked, after coach dismissed them. More than being thrown off the team, more than the rumours, he was concerned about this. "Why did you help me?"

"I didn't do it for you," Lily answered loftily. "I did it for Remus."

Sirius grinned. "You're all right, Evans."

"You owe me," was all she replied. "Don't worry, I'll collect."

Remus, breathless, leapt out at them from around the corner. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. His brown eyes were glowing.

"Be good, boys," Lily said, vanishing down a side-hallway.

* * *

**Invisible**

James Potter knew all about being invisible. He had his cloak, of course, but it was also easy to hide behind other things. Things like his glasses, his messy hair, his reputation. In a pinch he could hide behind Sirius, physically. 

When Sirius wrapped his arms around James' waist and kissed him, however, James had nowhere to run, and no way to turn invisible. The heat of Sirius' shirtless chest against his, the firm grip of Sirius' hands just above his belt, forbade it.

"You're done hiding," Sirius whispered, mouth against his throat. "Time to come out and play, James."

* * *

**Crush**

Ginny Weasley got over her crush on Harry in her fourth year. 

In fifth year, she decided she was over boys as a rule, as they were ridiculously obsessed with stupid things like Quidditch, and she had better ways to spend her time than playing second to a broomstick. 

Suddenly, in sixth year, she became the most alluring thing in Hogwarts Castle. 

Boys were everywhere, bothering her, but she turned them all down. They brought dumb flowers or gave her chocolate for stupid reasons or agreed with everything she said, no matter how ridiculous. 

Harry Potter charmed the quilt on her bed to trap her, so that she couldn't get out the next morning. Harry Potter hexed her hair to stand on end in the hallway. Harry Potter made her laugh at herself, and didn't bother with flowers or chocolate. He just told her he fancied her company, and then kissed her senseless. 

They lay one morning, the sun streaming through the windows of the dormitory room, and she knew she'd have to go soon. She smoothed his black hair against his head, smiling. 

Ginny Weasley got over her crush on Harry Potter, only to discover that she was in love with him.

* * *

**Routine**

It was a comfortable routine. Whatever else Remus might do, he always found enough for a morning newspaper. He didn't feel whole if he hadn't had the Daily Prophet to read. 

Sirius found him napping with the paper over his face, and pulled it back gently. Remus' eyes opened. He smiled sleepily. 

"Want the paper?" he asked. 

"Nope," Sirius said, and bent to kiss him before he was truly awake. There was a sigh against his lips, and he felt Remus' fingers tangle in his hair. "Want you." 

Remus found something much better in the mornings than the Daily Prophet.

* * *

**Touch**

He thought she was asleep, and didn't want to wake her; he just wanted to lean in the doorway and look at her for a while. Funny how people changed. Who'd have thought Ron's scrawny kid sister would grow up into...

Burnished copper hair, long pale arms, a perfect curve to her back, most of which was visible as she lay on the bed. He could see pyjama pants, though she was topless; she lay on her stomach, shoulders rising and falling with her breath. 

She turned, and he started back, wanting to hide. Too late; she'd seen him. 

She smiled. "I'm sore, Harry. Give us a hand?" she asked, and he moved forward, sitting on the bed, drawing small circles on the skin of her shoulders. She dropped her head, arched a little. He pressed harder, both hands, knuckling into her spine, fingers dancing across the sensitive skin of her lower back. He rubbed her neck with his thumbs, and she sighed happily. 

"That's good," she said, and rolled over. Harry stared, blinking, before looking away in a furious blush. Ginny's pale fingers turned his face back. 

"Might want to finish the job," she whispered, and pulled him down.

* * *

**R Rated:**

**Reason**

She was really just a kid. Percy had to keep telling himself that. She was in Ron's year, and Ron was just a kid! They were sixteen, for crying out loud.

She was a scatterbrain. Her whole life was fashion and hairstyles and boys, gossiping with her friends.

She was dishonest. She'd asked him to write three of her last eight compositions.

But Percy had done it, even though he wasn't even in school anymore, because when they met in Hogsmeade she wore that short uniform skirt hemmed up another few inches, and her shirt with three buttons undone.

He wasn't proud of himself, of course, but despite all the reasons he shouldn't be here in on the outskirts of Hogsmeade, pressing up against a tree with Lavender's legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, he was here anyway.

Because she was young, and a scatterbrain, and dishonest, and he liked her.

* * *

**Homework**

Remus Lupin considered things, dipped his quill in the inkpot near the pillow, and drew a line through the last eight words he'd written.

"Moony!"

"Sorry, Sirius. Run-on sentence," he said. "Had to correct it."

"Come on, Moony, please," Sirius begged. Remus smiled, and wrote another few words before finishing with a flourish. Sirius arched his back.

"Ah! Don't move, the ink will run," Remus said, pressing a hand to the small of Sirius' back, below the writing. "One of my better compositions, I think."

"Please Moony please," Sirius whined. Remus smiled, and eased his hips down against Sirius', kissing his neck.

"I told you if you were good while I finished my homework, you'd get a reward," he said, as the ink vanished into Sirius' skin, the aphrodesiac charm taking effect. 

Sirius moaned, and gave in. Homework, he decided, had never been this much fun before.

* * *

**Seekers**

Seekers are quick and nimble. 

Seekers are the heroes of the Quidditch world. They're famous. They win the games. Sure, team effort, blah blah blah, but come on now, Seekers, once they've seen the Snitch, are the one everyone watches. Forget scoring. It's Seekers. 

Harry Potter is the famous Seeker of course, but among true Quidditch aficionados, it's confirmed that Draco Malfoy has more finesse. Harry wins a lot, but he has no real style to him. Draco wins and he looks sexy doing it. 

It only makes sense that there'd be a certain amount of rivalry between the two and the sportswriters play it up. 

On the other hand, the photograph of Draco Malfoy, pressed up against the wall of a Quidditch stadium locker room with his playing robes open and Harry Potter's tongue in his mouth -- the one where his hands keep sliding up Harry's arms and Harry's hips keep pushing insistently against his -- sold for two thousand Galleons.

* * *

**Caught**

"Harry."

Pause.

"HARRY."

Harry jerked away from the bedpost, giving Remus an unparalleled view of Ginny Weasley, skirt hiked up, jumper rumpled, lips parted in surprise. 

Harry blushed furiously.

Remus frowned. 

"Nice Gryffindors," he said, as Ginny wriggled and tugged her skirt down, "Don't do that."

Harry opened his mouth to say something, but Remus laid a hand on his shoulder, moving him so that he was facing Ginny once more.

"Then again," he whispered in Harry's ear, as his hand slid around Harry's waist to rest on Ginny's, "I've never been very fond of the nice Gryffindors."

Ginny grinned.

* * *

**The Dance**

The game was the fun of it. That was what Sirius had taught him. It wasn't like you didn't know what would happen, after a point, but it was the dance after that point -- 

Remus smiled at some offhanded comment Tonks made, and sipped his wine. It was good wine. The Black cellars only stocked good wine. 

When Sirius woke him for breakfast the next morning, he saw Tonks' touseled pink-hair in the bedclothes, and shook his head.

"It's all in the seduction," Remus said loftily.

"Manwhore," Sirius answered affectionately, and bent to kiss him hungrily, before going down to breakfast.

* * *

**Nice Gryffindors**

Nice Gryffindors don't do this, Remus thought.

Nice Gryffindors don't touch Severus Snape's elbow just a little more than necessary.

Nice Gryffindors don't manufacture excuses to visit his private quarters.

Nice Gryffindors don't buy Slytherins with lovely growling voices a drink. 

Nice Gryffindors don't plot to get Severus Snape into bed.

Nice Gryffindors don't touch just there to make him demand more.

Nice Gryffindors definitely don't make Slytherins growl by exploring every inch of pale skin with their tongues...

...then again, if he weren't such a nice Gryffindor, he wouldn't have Severus Snape under him, against him, inside him...

* * *

**Kept Man**

"Minister Snape," said a voice, "There's a Mister Lupin here to see you."

Severus Snape, Minister of Magic for all of nine hours, finished chewing before replying. "Send him up."

"Very good, sir."

He pushed his dinner away, tapping it with his wand to send it to the kitchens, and sat back. Remus let himself into the dim office unobtrusively, as he did everything.

"Congratulations, Severus," he said, warm and honest, typically Gryffindor. "I saw in the paper this morning -- wanted to tell you in person. I spilled my tea when I heard."

Snape smiled, victoriously. Remus drifted a hand over the bust of a former Minister. 

"Amazing," he said. "Utterly amazing."

"Don't flatter me," Snape said drily. 

"You're a man of power now," Remus said, "A man of control."

Snape sat up straighter, curious. "What makes you say that?"

"Authority carried with dignity is attractive. I don't suppose you'd require my services in any capacity?"

Snape watched him circle the desk. "Are you proposing to be my...assistant, Lupin?"

"No," Remus grinned, settling long legs on either side of Snape's thighs, pulling his head up for a hard kiss. "I'm proposing to be your kept man."

* * *

**Apple**

The thing was, Regulus was beautiful.

Not that Sirius wasn't, but Sirius -- wide shoulders, barrel chest, solid-muscled body....

Remus preferred thin, graceful boys. Regulus was like Sirius, idealised. Besides, Sirius was a mate, and if he'd asked, Sirius probably would have done him, which defeated the point. 

Regulus was forbidden and sexy, and he would never have fucked a scholarship boy, let alone a werewolf. 

Remus watched from the shadows of the greenhouse, a quiet place most boys went sooner or later, and listened for the tell-tale sounds: a moan, a grunt, a whispered word. 

Echoing across the glass paneled walls now, words -- Regulus, secure that he was alone, releasing a high whine of pleasure and a name --

"L - l - Lupin..."

* * *

**Portrait Of The Artist**

Because then you see there was James king James king of the school James, strutting and rightly so, bright redheaded Irish Queen on his arm. And the brownhaired boy stood there so still, like the statues in the hallways and wished one day he could become a statue. 

Statues don't change don't hurt don't have to talk to people don't have to push through the so-crowded hallways full of unwashedbodysmell and friedbreakfastodor. 

But statues couldn't stand in libraries with drypapersmell and inkonfingers, or follow James King James through the hallways, watching his black hair and his brother Black with black hair like king and prince of the school, and he was just their jester not even that they had a jester. He was just the Grand Vizier, and not very grand at that. 

And yet here he was thieflike one night stealing over to the bed of James, James who had stuttered that afternoon in the library about marrying Lily because his parents parents of the king wanted children and Lily was nice and all but James liked OTHER THINGS HOLY CHRIST IN HEAVEN ABOVE and Remus the brownhaired boy sat so still, listening like a statue, getting hard under the table as James said what he liked so sweet from his mouth so kissable.

And King James knew nothing he needed an advisor he needed someone to advise him Remus could advise him with mouth and hands and bare skin body on body. Remus could advise him how to move his tongue against his cock and ease in so slow and 

Oh

His

King

and afterwards they lay in bed the brownhaired boy still so still like a statue clung to by a King who was drowning in his own royalty and thought Forever it will be like this Forever and that's okay.

* * *

**Lessons In Greek**

"That was it?"

_"Thank you."_

"No, I mean, you were splendid, it's just..."

_"Just?"_

"I expected something more..."

_"What more did you want?"_

"No, something more. Uh. Painful actually."

_"I said I'd never hurt you, Harry."_

"Everyone says that. Nobody means it."

_"I do. Did you...want it to be...? I'm not really good at that, I'm afraid."_

"No, I just..."

_"Harry."_

"Yes, Remus?"

_"This is traditional. I'm the teacher, you're the student. This is downright Greek, what we're doing."_

"I know that."

_"Then trust your teacher."_

"Are you going to teach me more?"

_"Oh yes. A lot more, I think."_

* * *

**Siberia**

"Siberia?"

"It's where werewolves live." Remus shrugged as he packed; Hermione unfolded one of his jumpers and re-folded it neatly. "I have to go to them. I'm always too warm in the summers anyway, Sirius."

"But it's Si-bloody-beria!"

Remus smiled and placed the jumper in his small suitcase, then lay on the bed, pillowing his head on Sirius' bare stomach.

"What would you suggest to keep me warm?" he asked, as Hermione's arms wrapped around him. 

"This," Hermione said, body moving flush against his as Sirius moved down to press against his back, kissing the nape of his neck. 

"And that..." Sirius added, grinning.

* * *

**Self-Defence**

Albus Dumbledore knew that Severus Snape was a Legilimens, but he always assumed it was magic picked up from his time with the Death Eaters; for a keen old man, he certainly paid little attention to his students. He'd had no idea there were three unregistered animagi running around the school -- or that there was an unlicenced Legilimens, as well.

James had been about to pin Snivellus to the wall as a welcome-to-seventh-year pounding for making snide remarks about Lupin's robes, but instead he found himself reeling backwards, clutching his head as what felt like his entire life, in mental images, flashed through his head. He managed to stay upright, but only just. 

Finally one image burnt itself onto his eyelids, and he gasped. Beyond him, somewhere, Snape laughed at the sight of Sirius Black, naked and writhing and moaning, hips bucking beneath James Potter, in his own memories.

"Touch me again," Snape's voice said, as James straightened, hands clapped over his eyes, "and I'll tell Lily Evans what you do with that slut Black in your spare time. Don't you think I could make her believe me?"

Lily never did find out why James and his pack finally started leaving Severus alone.

* * *

**Ten Questions**

_"Your turn to ask."_

"How many?" 

_"Many what?"_

"Girls. You've been with." 

_"Just girls?"_

"Merlin, Moony -- " 

_"You're the one who got me drunk asking questions I wouldn't answer eighteen questions ago. 'A shot for every one you won't answer' you said and now you're recycling questions and I'm not allowed to -- "_

"Eighteen? We were playing TEN questions!" 

_"Well, nobody kept count, did they, Prongs?"_

"You clearly did! Both!"

_"Both what?"_

"Girls and boys!"

_"Two and one, preemptively."_

"Prewhat?"

_"One, but I haven't had him yet."_

"Then he's not really one, is he -- ummm. No, do that again -- "

_"He is now."_


	8. Harry Potter: True Crime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by my **[Random Wiki Link](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grimes_sisters)**.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: Gen, PG for a little gore.  
> Warnings: None.  
> First Posted 2/28/07.

"What will you do now?"

Harry Potter leaned in the doorway of the little bedroom at Twelve Grimmauld Place, watching as Severus packed the few personal items the room held into a carton. His eyes, keen as ever, followed Snape's hands as they cradled the objects gently, wrapping some in tissue to protect them.

Snape didn't look up.

"Absolved of all guilt, hailed as a hero, defended as a spy for our side...dream come true for you, isn't it?" Harry asked, trying another tactic. Talking to Snape was like dentistry; you had to keep poking until you got a reaction. He tried not to sound bitter.

"I am not absolved. Absolution requires forgiveness. I am merely found not-guilty by society," Snape retorted, casting a quick cleaning charm across the dusty windows. 

"Whose forgiveness?"

Snape gave him a sardonic look. Harry narrowed his eyes. 

"You didn't answer my question," he repeated. Snape began packing the books in the shelves, a much larger task. "Now that the war is over, what will you do?"

"That is none of your concern."

"It's the concern of wizardkind. You're one of us now. At least in their eyes."

"But not in yours."

"You never wanted to be. You'd be insulted at the implication."

Severus stopped packing, both hands still in the carton, holding a book. 

"This will go to Spinner's End," he said. "All of this. Then you may burn the place down or blow it up, it doesn't matter to me."

"That's what _I'm_ going to do, not what you're going to do."

"Damn it, you foul little excretion, will you not leave me in peace!"

There was a knock on the doorframe, and Remus Lupin leaned around the edge, looming a little over Harry.

"Are we shouting at each other?" he asked mildly.

"Your turn to try," Harry sighed, and ducked under Remus' arm to escape. The two men, on more equal footing than Severus and Harry ever could be, exchanged a resigned look. Remus stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him.

"You should tell someone, at least, so that we know where to reach you," he said. His tone was gentle and noncommittal, but his eyes betrayed a certain level of curiousity.

"Why?"

"Because, Severus, like it or not, there are those who care about you."

"Don't condescend."

"I'm not," Remus said. "You're a horrible bastard and you've screwed me at least twice in this lifetime, but I've gotten rather used to you. And there's always the next life to get you back for it."

Severus sat on the bed, another book in his hands. Remus shoved his own hands in his pockets, waiting patiently.

"Brewery and concoction are what I teach, what I excel at," he begain slowly. "They are not what I am passionate about, except in the sense that one must be passionate to be properly precise."

"All right."

"You'll laugh at me."

"Shan't," Remus said, but he was already smiling. "Severus, are you confessing that you have a hobby? Oh, do tell me you're a kite-maker or an oil painter or something."

"Nothing so puerile."

"What, then? Are you running off to Africa to study Masai dance rituals?"

The mental image of himself in a Masai robe, a rope of shells and beads around his neck, made even Severus' lips twitch. 

"I'm going to America," he said.

"Amerindian dance rituals, then."

"No." Severus offered Remus the book in his hands. Remus studied the title.

" _Dark Chicago: A History of True Crime in the Windy City_ ," he read aloud. "So?"

"Well, you know how people are always going on about unsolved mysteries." Snape gestured airily at the book.

"You're going to Chicago."

"Yes."

"To solve some unsolved mysteries."

"To _investigate_ ," Snape corrected.

"Why...Severus, why _Chicago_? London wasn't good enough for you? Jack the Ripper?"

"I want a change of scenery," Snape insisted, as Remus hid his smile behind one hand. 

"Well, Chicago will certainly be that."

"You've really no idea, it's very interesting," Snape said. 

"I'm certain."

"There was a butcher who turned his wife into sausages."

"Sounds like they solved that one."

"And there's the Grimes sisters, they were murdered in nineteen-fifty-six."

"Gruesome."

"Quite."

Remus handed the book back to him. "I suppose it makes sense, really. Wizards have all kinds of tools that Muggles haven't got for solving this kind of case. Talking to ghosts, for one thing."

"Precisely."

"And it's quite appropriate that you would wish to set things right."

Snape looked up sharply at him. "What?"

Remus tilted his head. "Well, that's why you're going there, isn't it? to set things right?"

"I -- " Snape paused. "Why would you think that?"

"Severus." Remus sat on the bed, far enough away that Severus would not withdraw in distaste. "You must admit you've made a few cock-ups. And, all right, there have been a few made at your expense. Solving the unsolved, setting the world back in order...makes perfect sense to me, anyway. Your life's a little tip-tilted. All that guilt..."

They were silent for a while. Finally, Remus grinned, then laughed to himself.

"What is so amusing?"

"I was just picturing you riding the subway, wrapped up in one of those huge mufflers and a balaclava to keep your enormous nose warm..."


	9. Harry Potter: King And Cavalier

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes: Harry/Hermione/Viktor, R for sex. Inspired by a challenge ("Choose from the words: Ron, Viktor, Narcissa, knife, cavalier, body heat, young").  
> Warnings: None.

The Cavalier Ball was supposed to be the highlight of the year's social calendar, which was why Hermione Granger held out no hope at all of attending. 

It wasn't that she couldn't attend, she supposed. Indeed, she'd probably be doing them a favour by attending, given her standing in the Wizarding World. Harry Potter's advisor and companion, Ron Weasley's widow (didn't count, really, as they'd only been married a few days before the hex finally finished him), the heroine of the second war. It was just that she never had, and she found parties so boring. 

"You should go," Harry said, studying the invitation she'd carelessly left on the library table. It was from the fundraising committee; the Cavalier Ball raised money yearly for orphans or widows of aurors or something. 

"Why bother? It's boring."

"You'd get to wear a pretty dress."

Hermione glanced sidelong at him. "Harry, do you want to help me pick out a pretty dress?"

Harry blushed. "I don't want to wear one, if that's what you're implying."

"No, but you have the secret gay desire to dress me up, don't you. Don't deny it," she teased.

"I just think you'd have fun," Harry answered stiffly.

"All right, I'll make you a deal. You can pick out a pretty dress for me to wear if you dress up too," she said.

"I'm not going to some ball!"

"Harry, you've been practically a recluse for months. You have to come out of the house sometime. And then maybe later out of the closet, too," she said gently.

"I don't _have_ to," Harry sulked. Hermione batted her eyelashes at him.

"Just think of all the pretty dresses we'd have to look at," she said. "And you could go as Louis the fourteenth. All gold and white, with lots of sparkles..."

The sparkles were too much for Harry. He caved.

***

"Good lord," said Marcellus Dolohov, sipping a goblet of wine. "Look at Queen Potter."

Viktor turned his head from his vapid, boring date and followed Marcellus' gaze. It was unmistakeably Harry Potter and Hermione Granger who were walking into the ballroom; the scar was livid on Harry's powdered face, and no amount of sleeking potion could hide Hermione's beautiful chestnut hair. He caught his breath.

"Is that the Granger girl you were pen friends with?" Marcellus continued. 

"I, um, I think so," Viktor answered, swallowing hastily.

"Cleans up all right."

"Shut your mouth, Dolohov."

"Oho!" Marcellus grinned at Viktor. He offered his elbow to Viktor's date. "Come on, gorgeous, you won't even register for the rest of the night."

"Huh?" the girl asked.

"You're my date now," Marcellus said.

"Oh," the girl replied, calmly accepting his arm. Marcellus gave Viktor a shove. 

He nearly stumbled into Hermione, who tugged her wide golden dress out of the way before he could step on it. 

"Watch it, klutz -- " Potter started to say, then checked himself. "Hey -- Krum, is that you?"

"Harry," Viktor said, doffing his cavalier's hat. The big white feather waved annoyingly.

"You look great! Hermione, it's Viktor!"

"Yes," Hermione said, and her smile was...inexplicable. "I see. Good evening, Mr. Krum."

Viktor grinned back. "How do you do, Hermione."

Hermione laughed. "Your English has improved!"

"I've vorked hard on it. Evening, Harry."

Harry put out his hand and Viktor shook it. He noticed, as he did so, that Harry's eyes darted up and down his body. Perhaps his costume wasn't quite as flashy as Harry's, and it was a stupid English getup that he didn't comprehend the point of, but the warm appraisal in Harry's glance was...oddly intriguing.

"Are you here together?" he asked, and heard his own voice put a peculiar spin on the final word.

"More or less," Harry replied. "Hermione's allowing me to escort her."

"Ah, I see. And vould the king allow Hermione a dance vith a cavalier?"

Harry graciously handed Hermione over to Viktor, who kissed her fingertips. As they passed Harry, he felt a hand graze his thigh. 

"Rather less than more, eh?" he said in Harry's ear.

"Hurt Hermione and I'll break your legs," Harry replied pleasantly. 

***

"There's an awful lot of buckles on zis," Viktor complained, trying to unsling his fake sword and take his fake cavalier's hat off at the same time. 

"Tell me about it," Harry said into his neck, unbuckling his belt from behind. Viktor's hands fumbled with the laces on Hermione's dress.

"I'd like to," Viktor growled, and Harry slid his trousers off, stroking a hand across his groin. Hermione snickered, though it was cut off in the middle by a gasp as Viktor got her corset loose and flung it aside.

"Sure you're up for this?" Harry asked. Viktor felt him trying to struggle out of his costume.

"He's definitely up," Hermione said. She bit Viktor's earlobe.

"I was delicately asking if he's ever been buggered before, thanks Hermione," Harry grunted. "Oh, sod this," he added, and banished his clothing entirely.

"Nice of you to think of us," Hermione complained. Viktor grinned and muttered in Bulgarian. Hermione squeaked as the cold air hit her -- everywhere. 

"Well, have you?" Harry whispered in Viktor's ear.

"I'm sure you're an excellent tutor," Viktor replied, as Hermione tightened her thighs around his waist and threw her head back. Harry chuckled. 

"Never let it be said the king was unkind to his cavaliers," he murmured, and Viktor suddenly saw stars.


	10. Harry Potter: The Dye Job and The Shave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating: G

**The Dye Job**

Gilderoy Lockhart had once told Severus that his trick to winning fair maidens' hearts was his glorious head of golden hair (Severus used to mutter "on a platter" under his breath). Why he'd thought listening to him was a good idea, he wasn't sure, but it was true that in matters of the heart Lockhart had more experience than he. Theoretically speaking. 

Ergo, having found an object of affection and set out to woo her, the logical first step seemed clear. 

He stared at his reflection, stunned. 

"Blond doesn't look too good on you, does it?" Remus Lupin asked, from the doorway of the upstairs bathroom at Grimmauld Place. Snape was still in shock, standing before the sink, and didn't answer. "Especially white-blond. Makes you look like one of Lucius Malfoy's groupies." 

Severus continued to stare. 

"It's your skin tone, you see," Lupin added, amiably. "I suppose you used a magical fixative, didn't you." 

"It's permanent," Snape said, in horror. "I'll have to shave off all my hair." 

"Fortunately, I know a spell -- " 

"FIX IT!" 

Lupin held out a hand over the crown of Snape's head, pointing with his wand in his other hand, and eased it back while muttering to himself in Greek. Slowly the horrifying blond faded into a suitable shade of black. He repeated the move down the sides of his head, but left the tips a paler shade. 

"Now," Lupin said, seating himself on the tub, "we're going to go about your courtship of Emmeline Vance properly."

* * *

**The Shave**

"But not the moustache." Snape sounded puzzled. "You left your moustache alone."

"I like my moustache."

"Why?"

Remus Lupin looked up into the mirror, not at Severus Snape but at his reflection. Snape would never stoop to something so casual as leaning against the bathroom wall, but his arms were crossed and his lips were twitching. It looked like he might be trying not to laugh.

"Don't answer," Snape continued. 

"I thought it might make me look younger."

"And you would want that why?"

"Because I'm thirty-six and I look like I'm fifty?"

"Having our mid-life crisis a bit early, are we?"

"Says the man who dyed his hair bright yellow last year."

"We promised never to speak of that," Snape hissed.

"Listen, no one asked you to come in here and give your opinion, you just barged in while I was cleaning up. So if you would like to give an opinion please do so and then depart."

Snape reached out and ran a hand over Lupin's bald scalp, so quickly that he didn't have time to duck.

"It's....smooth," he conceded, and vanished out the door.

Remus grinned at himself in the mirror.

"I like it," he announced, to no one in particular.


	11. Harry Potter: Lemons and Too Late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dumbledore is too late for Remus Lupin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: G  
> Warnings: None

**Drabble: Lemons, the origin of Too Late**

"I'm glad you told Harry," Remus Lupin said, adding lemon to his tea. Dumbledore often thought someone should study werewolf tastebuds. Remus would add lemon to anything. "He was crushed when he heard Ron made Prefect." Dumbledore watched in amazement as he sipped, winced, and added another slice.

"Yes, I've meant to discuss that with you," Dumbledore said, sipping his own tea. 

"Me? whatever for?"

"I know you took it to heart when James made Head Boy," said the Headmaster. Remus looked up sharply. "I thought it was best you didn't know..."

"Didn't know?" Remus asked, in a level tone. "I assumed it was because of my..."

"James was...charismatic. A Quidditch player. Well-known." Dumbledore sighed. "He was already in the Order."

Understanding dawned on Remus' face. "Able to recruit," he murmured.

"The professors fought it. They thought you deserved it," Dumbledore said. "So did I. But James could further the fight. You and Sirius served better by being his checks."

Remus nodded.

"I'm glad you told Harry," he repeated. He took another sip, and stood. "You're about fifteen years too late, in my case."

He walked away, hands in pockets, leaving Dumbledore with his head bowed over his tea.

***

**Too Late**

"I'm glad you told Harry," Remus Lupin said, adding lemon to his tea. 

They were sitting in the dim, warm kitchen of Twelve Grimmauld Place, where they always met. They never discussed the fact that Remus lived there -- he couldn't afford anywhere else, these days, and this way there was always someone to make sure the place was clean and there was food to be had for incoming Order members who might need to stay the night. Still, it was a sensitive point, since Remus didn't take charity lightly, and had very broad definitions of 'charity'.

He squeezed the lemon slice, then added the pulp to the tea. Dumbledore wondered if it was merely a quirk of the younger man's personality, or if someone ought to study werewolf tastebuds. Remus would add lemon to anything, and he loved Molly Weasley's lemon muffins with an almost disturbing passion. 

"Told Harry?" Dumbledore inquired.

"About why he wasn't chosen for Prefect last year, I mean," Remus answered, stirring. "He mentioned you'd explained things. He was crushed when he heard it was Ron instead."

Dumbledore watched in mild amazement as Remus sipped, winced, and added another lemon wedge.

"Yes, I've been meaning to discuss that with you," the older man said, blowing on his own cup to cool it -- he took sugar, and a spoonful of milk. 

"Me? Whatever for?" Remus asked, sipping idly now that he'd got it mixed properly. 

"I know you took it to heart when James made Head Boy, when you were at school," said the Headmaster. Remus looked up sharply, eyes suddenly keen and curious. "I know it's usually Prefects who get the title. I thought it was best -- at the time, you see -- easier. If you didn't know."

"Didn't know?" Remus asked, in a level tone. "Didn't know what? I assumed it was -- well, I thought perhaps I hadn't done well enough in classes, but...Sirius said it had to be because of my..." he gestured with his hands, sketching uncertain shapes in the air. 

Dumbledore shook his head, and sighed. "James was...he was a Quidditch player, a charismatic boy. He was well-known, and he made good use of it." He paused. "He was already in the Order. I didn't want it that way, but we needed someone young, someone still at the school, to keep us abreast of what the other students were thinking."

"A spy."

"A monitor. There were already Death Eaters amongst you, someone had to make sure they did no real damage."

Understanding dawned on Remus' face. "And James was popular. People liked him. He could recruit," he murmured.

"The professors fought it. They thought you deserved it," Dumbledore said. "So did I. But James could further the fight. You and Sirius served better by being his checks, making sure he didn't go too far or take too many risks."

Remus nodded. His fingers loosened their grip on the teacup in front of him.

"I'm glad you told Harry," he repeated, slowly. He took another sip, and stood. "You're about fifteen years too late, in my case."

And he walked away, hands in pockets, leaving Dumbledore with his head bowed over his tea.


	12. Harry Potter: Mealtime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: None.  
> Rating: R. RL/SB, CW/NT, SB/SS, RL/BW/SB

BREAKFAST

There is no tidy way to eat a muffin. Especially the sort with sweet crumb topping. 

Remus picked the top off accidentally, meaning to split it. His fingertips tore bits off, placing them on his tongue through his open lips as he sat at breakfast. 

Sirius watched, entranced, as Remus began on the rest, licking his fingers when crumbs stuck, mobile lips moving across his knuckles. His tongue swirled over one fingertip. Sirius fought down a growl. 

Later, in their rooms upstairs, Remus didn't understand why Sirius was so fascinated with the taste of cinnamon muffin in his mouth. 

***

LUNCH

It was late spring, and fruit season. This was a problem for Charlie, who always sat across the table from Nymphadora.

Her fingers peeled oranges indecently and the pulp left on her lips when she ate the fruits was almost obscene. She did it unconsciously, Charlie told himself. When she smiled at lunch over his sandwich, he took an apple from her, biting into it firmly, lapping up the juice.

Nymphadora blushed.

That was the week Charlie discovered he'd been plucked by Dora, like the thick ripe fruits she ate. 

***

TEA

"What are YOU doing here?"

Snape didn't look up. "Having my tea."

Sirius did not retreat as Snape hoped; instead he crashed about, making new tea, though there was already a pot at Snape's elbow. 

"Lemon?" Sirius sneered.

"Adds flavour." 

Snape sipped, catching a stray drop with a finger. He was raising it to his mouth when Sirius' hand stopped him.

Sirius bent, licking the tea off. 

"Bitter," he said.

Snape let himself be pulled roughly up, and kissed carelessly, Sirius' tongue an invasion in his mouth.

"Yes," he answered.

***

DINNER

Between the tight hot kisses Sirius was filling his mouth with and the feathery touches of Remus' hands on his shoulderblades, Bill managed a single word. 

"Dinner!" 

Remus, who was behind him and hadn't heard as well, continued to shift and thrust against him, hands on his waist occasionally stretching out to touch Sirius' naked hip on the other side of the slim, muscular Bill. 

"Dinner?" Sirius asked, sliding a hand down Bill's flat belly, and lightly over his cock.

"We'll miss dinner," Bill panted.

Remus and Sirius smiled at each other over his shoulder.

"Yes," said Sirius, "we will."


	13. Harry Potter: Charity Shorts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short fics written for charitable fundraising. Usernames of requesting prompters are listed before each fic.

kadollan: Remus/Sirius, Marauders-Era

The lake was freezing even in summertime, but "swimming" was a good excuse for lying around nearly-naked on the nice days in May. Even Remus had caved and was wearing cuffed trousers and a Hogwarts shirt with the sleeves rolled past his elbows. 

Padfoot, unafraid of cold, came rampaging out of the water and flopped on the grass. Remus reached out to rub his ears and Sirius changed back abruptly; Remus found himself with one hand tangled in Sirius' thick, wet hair. 

"Good dog," he whispered.

"Always," Sirius said, and stole his first kiss while James was looking the other way.

***

melayneseahawk: Remus/Sirius: Pre-31 October, 1981

"It's disgusting," Sirius said firmly. "Married people oughtn't do that."

"You don't think it's nice?" Remus asked, watching James and Lily from across the room. They had come to the Hallowe'en party as Merlin and Nimue, which was -- yes, a bit cheesy, he'd admit. 

"It's boring," Sirius answered. He had come as Pan, allowing him to wear as few clothes as possible. Remus, more modestly, had nicked James' old game robes and come as a Quidditch player.

"Boring does not automatically equate to disgusting," Remus replied. "I'm boring."

Sirius glanced at him. Suddenly Remus felt actually pretty naked.

"Anything but," said Pan. 

***

siegeofangels: Remus, something happy.

It was evening in London, and Harry had finished with Order business for the day; he found Remus sitting on the back porch of Grimmauld Place, sunk in thought. 

"You're really not going back to Hogwarts tomorrow?" Remus asked him, accepting the cold butterbeer Harry offered. 

"Nope," Harry said.

"What are you going to do with all that free time?" Remus asked, smiling. Harry looked out at the ratty, overgrown garden that nobody had bothered or been able to fix. 

"Plant some trees," Harry said. "Want to help?"

Remus smiled at him, an almost excited smile. "Yes! That would be lovely."

***

heidi8

Regulus threw himself down all in a heap in one of the library chairs, the way he often did -- loose-limbed, carelessly handsome, apt to bruise anyone who was casually in his way. 

"Still studying?" he asked, tossing curly black hair out of his eyes. Barty looked up at him and sighed.

"Civil service entry to the Ministry requires either five NEWTS or two years' service with MLE. Father's made it perfectly clear what he expects."

"Civil service," Regulus sneered. 

"Father's a civil servant."

"Barty, come out with me tonight. I've been invited to a party."

"I'm studying."

Regulus leaned forward. "Crouch, listen up. You and I, we're a cut above the ordinary and you know it. We could lick the rest of the school combined on pure cunning. Why do you want to spend the rest of your life pandering to halfbreeds and licking the soles of mudbloods? I'm offering you a chance to join a revolution."

Barty looked up slowly. "Who's going to be at this party of yours, Regulus?"

Reg's eyes sparkled. "Well, the man who superintends the NEWT exams, just as a start. But I expect other and more exalted guests before the night is through."

Later, Barty would admit that at least Voldemort had this: he was an expert recruiter, and knew exactly what would lure the young, the disaffected, and the power-hungry to his side.

* * *

naatz

"Okay, no, wait, I've really got it this time," Sirius said, holding his fists ready at his sides. The wind across the rolling hills of Hogwarts' grounds ruffled his hair.

"Sirius, you've never even read a book on the martial arts in your life," Remus sighed, sitting on the bench nearby. Sirius scowled at him.

"I saw about a hundred kung-fu films with James this summer," he announced, and kicked a shrubbery. Remus snickered. "Well, if you're such a grand master, you show me how it's done."

"Watch and learn, Grasshopper," Remus replied. He closed his book, stood up, and with a well-aimed kick snapped one of the boards on the bench in half, barefoot. Sirius stared.

"Control is important," Remus said, looking uneasy. "I had to learn to control my body somehow."

Sirius licked his lips. Remus frowned. 

"That was, uh, neat," Sirius said breathlessly. 

"It's easy if you have someone to show you how," Remus answered. "Just takes practice. Here, like this."

He grabbed Sirius' left thigh and went to position it, but found that it was rigid with tension. He looked up into Sirius' face, and found Sirius kissing him before he knew what was happening. His hand, still on the other boy's thigh, edged upwards.

"If I'd known karate was going to impress you that much," he said, "I would have kicked that bench around months ago."

* * *

bicrim

They met under less than ideal circumstances, that must be said. Harry was tired and his arm was broken; Draco was a fugitive and additionally had no wand. When Draco walked into the abandoned building where Harry was hiding, they eyed each other for a moment.

"Do you want to try to kill me now, or wait until later?" Draco said tiredly.

"If it's all the same to you, let's wait," Harry replied. Draco sat down facing him.

"Good. I've run off, by the way; hadn't the stomach for what I was told to do. Broke Mum's heart," Draco added carelessly. He tugged Harry's broken arm away from his body and held out his hand for Harry's wand. Harry, sighing, offered it up. "Anyway, you know what I realised?"

"What's that?" Harry asked.

"We're fucking _seventeen._ Even the bloody Muggles wait till their kids are eighteen before they send them off to die. So I figure, I don't owe anyone anything anymore."

"I haven't got that luxury," Harry muttered. The pain in his arm faded and died, and he sighed in relief. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Draco replied. Then he smiled. "See? I'm learning manners."

Then he tipped Harry's chin up and kissed him gently on the lips, almost a benediction.

"And I'm learning about how to say I'm sorry," Draco added. "So if you'd rather not kill me, I could spend a few years making things up to you. I'd like that."

Harry stared at him, curiously.

"All right," he said. "I could deal with that."

* * *

jiapa: 

_(normally I'm not into BDSM at all, but I found this remarkably hot while I was writing it.)_

Severus Snape gasped and tried not to wriggle, but it was difficult. Three parallel lines seemed burned into his back, and the sting of the third had not yet faded before a fourth was laid on. The swift whistle of the thin cane through the air was a warning, but when that fourth hit landed, perfectly parallel and very close to the third, he lurched forward before regaining his head.

"Four," he counted breathlessly. 

"What do you say?" asked a gentle voice -- far too gentle for what its owner was inflicting on him. He felt endorphines rush through his system as he contemplated that voice.

"May I please have another, Professor?" he asked. The cane whistled through the air and a fifth stroke hit, not where he was expecting but across the seat of his trousers. He jumped and squirmed.

"Five."

"Do you need six?" the voice asked. 

"No, professor," he answered, gritting his teeth. 

"Very good," said the professor behind him, and he heard the clatter of the cane being placed in the umbrella-stand near the door. Hands grasped his shoulders, careful of the cane-marks there, and gently peeled away the Hogwarts shirt he'd put on for the occasion. 

"Now you've had your punishment," he said calmly. "You won't be rude at dinner again, will you, Severus?"

"No," Severus said. The hands caressed his back, admiring their handiwork. Four even welts stood out red against his pale skin. A jar on the table was picked up and opened, and cool balm was rubbed into the welts, soothing away the pain. 

"Good boy," Remus Lupin murmured in his ear. "I might even reward you for taking your strokes so manfully."

Severus smiled and bowed his head, studying the grain of the desk in Lupin's study. "I'd like that...professor."

* * *

terrierhead

Severus was twenty-eight, a Professor at Hogwarts, head of Slytherin House, a respected member of the academic community, and absolutely miserable.

Chiefly, at the moment, his misery derived from a long cold climb up one of the higher peaks that surrounded the little valley of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. The bundle of firewood and the pack on his hip also contributed significantly, as did the rain. 

When he reached the peak, however, it was only eleven-thirty; plenty of time to kindle the fire and perhaps even make a cup of tea. He piled the firewood on top of the tinder, lit it with a flint and steel, and sat back on his heels as the flame began to leap skyward. The air up here was cool and calm; he could see the stars, could almost feel them wheeling around above him. Below, only a few windows were lit in Hogwarts -- the Headmaster's study, and the Ravenclaw common room.

He took a pocketwatch out and checked the time. Twenty seconds to midnight.

"Happy new year, Severus," Albus Dumbledore said, and Snape closed the watch with a startled _snap._

"I didn't expect you to come up here for the New Year," Severus said.

"Oh yes. Well, someone has to first-foot the castle," Dumbledore said, holding up a bottle of wine. He took another out of his volumnous pockets and offered it to Severus, who smiled.

"Care to come with me?" Albus asked.

"I should like nothing better," Severus replied. 

_Note:[First footing traditions in Great Britain.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-Foot)_

* * *

hapendfro

Ron felt it was the ultimate irony that a man who couldn't see, who lived in perpetual darkness, should suffer from insomnia.

Oh, he knew that he was lucky to have survived the war at all, and the Healers assured him that the blindness was temporary. They were working on a countercurse all the time, and would no doubt have one soon.

That did little to balm his exhausted impatience with a world gone black, an impatience which spilled over onto Hermione and made him shout angrily at her and shove her away (sometimes physically) when she tried to help. The war was over and _she_ wasn't blind, she was just fine. It wasn't fair. Besides, what did she want with a poor, blind, war-traumatised Weasley? Soon enough she'd stop trying.

But then there was one night, three months after the war had ended, when she came to him and wouldn't let him push her but instead grabbed his wrists and forced him to hold still until he relaxed his arms. Then she took his questing fingers and pressed them to warm, taut skin. At first he didn't understand what he was feeling -- it was all the wrong shape -- but then he realised what Hermione was showing him. 

As understanding dawned, so did an odd sort of light; the realisation that Hermione was holding his hands to her slightly swollen belly, pressing his fingers over the place where a baby was growing, seemed to brighten the darkness and after a few minutes he could see a red-and-brown blur that turned out to be a jumper Molly had knitted for the mother of her first grandchild.

Ron lifted his eyes to Hermione's smiling face.

"Miracle," he breathed.

* * *

aura218: Remus and/or Sirius' thirtieth birthday. Elements included must be Harry and minor catastrophe.

Remus Lupin celebrated his thirtieth birthday, primarily, sitting in a chilly school auditorium. 

Actually, that wasn't entirely true. He'd bought himself lunch at a nice restaurant (extravagance!) and spent an enjoyable afternoon at the cinema, but he'd made sure the film ended by five and then caught a bus across town to the primary school that most of the Little Whinging children attended. There he'd paid three pounds for a photocopied ticket, found a seat on a folding chair, and settled himself in to wait eagerly for the show. 

It wasn't, of course, a very good show. There was a minor catastrophe when one of the little girls tripped and fell over one of the set pieces. The story itself was only vaguely coherent, something about a snake-charmer and a princess, but Remus didn't care. He was holding his breath for -- 

This moment. A tousel-haired little kid, eight or nine years old, appeared on stage. He was dressed like some kind of magician's apprentice, and he very carefully carried a paiper-mache prop across the stage to the snake-charmer. He had two lines: "Here is your flute sir" and "You're welcome." Then he bolted from the stage so fast he nearly tripped on his oversized costume shoes. 

Remus applauded furiously with all the other proud parents and siblings as the entire cast took a bow. Little Harry Potter, nearly hidden behind an enormously fat young boy, smiled shyly at everyone and Remus sighed happily. 

Excellent birthday present.

* * *

aegyptus: Something Black Books

"Harry Potter! Fucking Harry Potter!" 

Bernard Black kicked over a stack of books and glared at Manny. 

"What? They're not bad," Manny said, from behind an enormous tome with a blue-and-black cover. "They get kids reading." 

"WHO WANTS KIDS TO READ?" Bernard demanded. "They are a blot on literature!" 

"You're just bitter because you didn't write them first, you big Muggle," Manny retorted. Bernard clutched his chest, mortally offended. 

"Fran, tell him," he ordered, sinking down into his chair as if he might faint at any moment. 

"Harry Potter books are wicked," Fran said, taking out a photocopied sheet of paper. "They warp the minds of children and encourage the worship of Satan." 

Manny put his book down slowly. 

"So that means...." he said, horrified. Fran nodded. 

"Yep. If you read those books you'll end up just like Bernard."

* * *

raistmimi: Can I get an HP/GO crossover? Crowley as the next Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher! That should be plenty Slytherin.

Returning to Hogwarts for seventh year was a pretty depressing thing, after all that had happened the previous June. Dumbledore dead, Draco missing, Harry dropped out; plenty of others had dropped out too, not seeing the benefit in returning to what Dean Thomas called "Deathtrap Away From Home". Hermione and Ron weren't expecting much fun their final year of school. 

There was, of course, the usual gossip about who would be their Defence professor; some said they'd heard Mad-Eye Moody would do it, and others said the Ministry was sending someone else. Whoever it was, they weren't at the High Table during the sorting feast and McGonagall made no mention of the new professor in her greeting speech. 

Plenty of students were early to their first Defence class that year, but Hermione and Ron were the first. When they entered, they found a curly-haired man in black Muggle clothing lounging indolently against the professor's desk, wearing sunglasses though the glassroom was quite dim. 

"Hallo," he said, and Hermione swore she saw a flicker of forked tongue -- but that couldn't be, because a second later he spoke again and his tongue looked perfectly normal. "You must be my new studentss. I'm Professor Crowley." 

"Yes, Professor," Ron said staunchly. "Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, Gryffindor house." 

"Mmm. I have a friend who was in Gryffindor. Or would have been, if he'd attended," the new Professor said with a grin. "I fancy myself a Ravenclaw, but then the truly wicked have to be a bit clever to keep out of trouble's way, don't they?" 

"Are you from the Ministry?" Hermione asked, sitting down. 

"Oh no. Just...laying low after a bit of a political incident," he replied. "I'm here to make sure you lot don't get up to too much mischief this year." 

Ron didn't like the sound of this, and it must have showed on his face. 

"Don't worry, kid," Professor Crowley said. "I haven't actually chosen sides yet."


	14. Harry Potter/House MD: Who's Who

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> House draws some unlikely parallels...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating: G  
> Note: Written on inspiration from Bicrim.  
> Warnings: None.

"Harry Potter," House said. Cameron stopped in mid-diatribe and stared at him.

"What?" she asked.

"Harry Potter. You're Harry Potter," he said. "You're all, we must save the world and I must suffer."

"Have you actually read those books?" Foreman asked disdainfully. 

"Yes, I have, Albus Dumbledore," House answered. 

"Isn't he the boss?" Foreman asked. He smirked a little.

"No, he's the arrogant, manipulative asshole," House retorted. "Which makes you..." he pointed at Chase, "Draco Malfoy."

"I am not!" Chase protested hotly. Then he blushed. "I mean, I don't know anything about those stupid books."

"You are so sneaky snobby damaged blond kid," House asserted. "Though only because Wilson beat you out for Remus Lupin."

"Pathetic and gay?" Foreman asked.

"Intelligent and grownup and gay, and how did you know?" House demanded. Foreman looked sheepish. 

"Who are you, then?" Chase demanded.

"Duh. I'm the evil overlord. Which means that some day I will destroy you," he pointed at Cameron. 

"He wishes," Wilson said from the doorway. "Come on. Cool, deranged, he owns a motorcycle..."

"Sirius Black," everyone chorused.


	15. Harry Potter/Good Omens: Unpredictable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus likes books, and dark-haired men.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: None  
> Rating: PG

Remus liked books. And dark-haired men. When he saw AJ Crowley in Flourish & Blott's, he licked his lips; when he saw Aziraphale, he caught himself doing it.

Crowley was obvious. He was tall and dangerous and looked like Sirius, which Remus always wanted in the bad-substitutes he'd had in the past decade. But Remus found it was Aziraphale he spoke to, watching his pale pink lips, Aziraphale whose hands were gentle, whose short blonde hair was soft on his thighs as he watched those pale lips...

Crowley was the obvious choice. 

Even Remus Lupin could sometimes be unpredictable.


	16. House MD: Shortfics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shortfics, some of them written for charity fundraising.

wanderingwidget: House, and Steve McQueen.

Wilson thought it wasn't hygenic to keep a rat in the kitchen, but Steve was only there when Wilson was. House knew rats came back to food; rats were intelligent and learned faster than humans. When Wilson wasn't around, Steve had the run of the place. 

On cold mornings, Steve often skittered into the bedroom, curling up on House's left foot while he worked the knots out of his leg. Then there was cheese and eggs for breakfast, and life was measurably better.

"Only you would bond with a rat," Wilson said to him once, teasingly.

"He likes me," House replied. 

***

Koneko_meow: House; Wilson's reaction to House being shot.

House looked bad. His skin was grey, strung taut against his cheekbones, and his eyes were dull. Wilson stood in the doorway, watching him until House's gazed reached the door. His eyebrows lifted.

Wilson stepped into the room and glanced down at the floor, smiled, tried not to cry, pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Hi," he said. 

"Hi," House answered.

"Feeling okay?"

"I am now," House slurred. "Morphine."

Wilson felt hysteria threaten again and smashed it down.

"I'll be fine," House assured him sleepily.

"Thought you'd like to know..." Wilson swallowed and plowed ahead, "I won the pool on when you'd be shot by a patient."

***

L-Space, that transdimensional collapsing point brought on by large collections of books, was not supposed to be used as a travel agency, but it was the only way. Vimes was pacing impatiently by the time the Librarian returned, leading a man who looked...

Remarkably like Vimes, actually. Excepting the cane.

"You're the roundworld doctor?" Vimes asked abruptly as the man halted under the library's dome. 

"My name is House," the man said. "I hear you have a plague for me."

Vimes nodded. 

"Not much on words?"

"No, House."

"Good, me neither."

Vimes eyed him. "You won't last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork."

"I bite," House replied. Vimes grinned.

***

ekaterinn: House/Good Omens.

There was a convention in London, something about cancer, and Wilson had talked him into going along because, well, sometimes it _was_ a difficult diagnosis.

But after the first two lectures, House had wandered out into the city, bored, and stumbled across a bookshop that looked interesting. Definitely interesting; there were two men at the till arguing religion. As he knew would happen, they eventually appealed to him.

"You," the one in the suit said, pointing. "Do you believe in divine retribution?"

"Only if I'm the one who gets to dole it out," House replied, grinning at him. "How much for the Dante?"

***

thewlisian_afer

Wilson leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Sometimes he imagined what life would be like without House in it, and while in some ways it was too horrible to contemplate, at least he would never have had to learn the value of Taking A Moment.

"How is he?" he asked Cameron.

"Fine, now," she replied. "That sock to the gut from the patient's mom is going to hurt in the morning."

"It always does," Wilson sighed. 

"Can I ask you something?" she said, and he opened his eyes.

"Of course," he replied. 

"You want to go out for a drink?"

He blinked at her. "What?"

"A drink. Something really alcoholic," she added. 

"You don't think that might be a little...perilous?" he asked carefully. She smiled and straightened his tie.

"No," she said, fingers lingering on the knot. "I don't."

* * *

sanura:

"Do you know how Christmas came to be?" House asked Wilson, who was sitting next to him on the sofa, eating take-away Chinese. Wilson, well-acquainted with the ritual of Chinese Food On The 24th, frowned.

"As I understand it, with my vague Jewish grasp of things, the saviour of the world was born in a manger and things went from there," he said.

"No," House replied. "Christmas is based on a Mithradic celebration of birth and flame meant to stave off the darkness during the time when the nights were longest and it got really fucking cold. Then they stole the Christmas Tree from the Celts when the Romans really got going on it, and Santa Claus was a nordic paedophile."

"Merry Christmas, House," Wilson said with a smile.

"Fuck you, Bob Cratchet."

Wilson slid closer and took away House's take-away carton, putting it on the coffee table. 

"Well, we could always commit a grevious sexual sin on Christ's birthday. That ought to piss off whoever you really want to annoy," he said softly.

House grinned. "I'll get the frankincense, you get the myrrh."

* * *

jiapa: House/Wilson

"I have a plan," House announced one day. Actually he didn't really announce it, he sort of whispered it conspiringly over lunch. Wilson, in the middle of a mouthful of soup, swallowed and blotted his lips calmly. 

"Well, if you distract the guards with a striptease, I bet I can fit eight or nine gold bricks down my pants. More if I wear the clown pants," he said. 

"That was last week's plan, will you get with the times?" House replied. "I'm talking about a plan to get in Robert Chase's pants." 

"Have you seen his pants? Yours are nicer." 

"I'm sorry, which of us is gay here?" House asked. 

"I didn't peg him as your type. I thought you liked men with spines, brains, and less obsession with hair-care products. And how do you know I'm not gay? I could be gay." 

"If you are, you really suck at it. I don't know if you've noticed but you've been married three times." 

"Come to think of it, why DO you want to get in Chase's pants? He really isn't your type and you don't sleep with your assistants anyway." 

"Because he's hot," House said sardonically. Wilson narrowed his eyes. 

"This little plan is part of some bigger plan, isn't it?" he asked. "You're not sleeping with him just to crush his spirit, are you? 'Cause I hear Cameron already did that. Is this some kind of Machiavellian plot to make someone jealous? There's someone else, isn't there?" 

"You don't trust me?" House asked. 

"No," Wilson said, almost incidentally. "There's someone else with a spine and a brain and you're planning to find out if he's jealous or not." 

House stared at him for so long that Wilson began to have deeply upsetting inklings. 

"Apparently not," he said finally. Wilson's inklings became whole inkpots. 

"House, were you just not listening when I said I could be gay?" he asked. House continued to stare. "I'll tell you what, here's my plan. I'll finish work and show up at your place for drinks around seven and by eleven o'clock if I haven't convinced you of the possibility, we'll go with the bank heist plan, okay?" 

Silence. Wilson began to fret, until finally the other man spoke again. 

"Thank god I don't have to fuck Chase," House blurted.

* * *

Wittgirl: House fic

"I don't care if you're God and I'm carrying the messiah," Cuddy had said. "You're going to therapy. Having a doctor in jail is bad publicity." 

Agreeing seemed to be wisest. Pregnant women were so bitchy, he said, but he gave in. 

Cameron kissed him and said she'd come along, but he told her to take the hour and pick up some chick in a bar for a three-way after. 

"So," said the therapist, whom House had selected by tossing a coin, "Why are you here?" 

"Well, due to stress caused by dating my assistant and my boss carrying my in-vitro spawn, I may have slipped a little and punched one of my patients in the nose hard enough to break the cartilage like a cheap pencil," House said. 

He knew he'd picked the right guy when the man replied, "For a guy with only one functioning leg, you get around, don't you?"

* * *

dine: House fic

"Give me your coffee," House said to Chase that morning, standing outside the hospital while he waited for Cuddy to walk by so he could make rude remarks. "I want to try something." 

"No," Chase declared. "You're just plotting on theft." 

"It's not a plot, give me your coffee," House replied. Chase held it up and back, out of reach. House couldn't reach forward without overbalancing, and if he tried to circle around, Chase would have time to run away. 

"It is, it's a plot to steal my coffee because you were too lazy to go to Starbucks and you're stuck drinking hospital coffee," Chase continued, dancing out of the way every time House feinted towards him. 

"This is in the name of SCIENCE!" House shouted, then poked him in the ribs with the butt-end of his cane handle. Chase doubled over instinctively, and the coffee came down... 

All over House. 

He stood there, arms spread, coffee dripping from his fingers and elbows and the end of his nose. It poured down his face in little rivulets and matted his hair against his head. 

"That's hot," Cuddy said as she walked past, giving House a little smirk and a wave of her fingertips. House turned on Chase, expressionless. 

"Karma's a bitch," Chase said with a shrug. 

Then he ran for his life.

* * *

bedofbones: House would be amazing, since he's so Slytherin-ey it's ridiculous

"You don't see anything wrong with this picture," Wilson said, hands on his hips in that ridiculous pose he'd probably started affecting in the fourth grade and never grown out of. 

"Should I?" House asked. He held his hand up to eye level and studied the little creature in it with apparent glee. 

"You own a rat. Granted, you were ready to bash in his head in the name of science, but you are mostly fond of him, aren't you?" 

"People aren't _fond_ of Steve McQueen," House replied, not breaking eye contact. "Women want to do him, men want to be him." 

"Snakes _eat_ rats," Wilson said finally. He was keeping his distance from the small black snake now wrapping itself around House's wrist. House turned to him and held out his hand in offering. Wilson stepped back a pace. 

"She's way too small to eat a whole rat on her own. Besides, Steve is a mean bastard," House replied. "She doesn't even get a whole mouse yet. Why do you think I have all the crickets?" 

"I wasn't going to ask," Wilson sighed. "What are you naming her?" 

"Kim Novak," House replied promptly.

House/Who Crossover: Physician, Heal Thyself

"You look awful. I think you're sick. Got a sore throat?"

_"No. And I don't get sick."_

"Well, you look sick."

_"Why is there stuff coming out of my nose?"_

"You've got a cold."

_"Nonsense."_

"You have. Better get to a doctor."

_"I AM a doctor!"_

"Yeah, but like...not really." 

_"I might be."_

"Doctor, if you don't take us to see a doctor I'm not going to give you any more tissues." 

_"But there's stuff! Coming out my nose!"_

"Use your sleeve."

_"That's just disgusting. What if it's my brains?"_

"It's just snot. See a doctor. You have to know at least a few."

_"Right. When a Time Lord's brains start leaking out through his nose, there's only one person to call."_

***

"What is it?" Wilson asked, coming up behind House.

"It's a police call box," House replied, studying the blue box in the corner of his office intently. "They were all over London in the fifties."

"Did you buy it or something?"

"No. It just showed up."

"What do you mean? Who delivered it?"

"Nobody. It was just there."

"That's a little weird," Wilson said. 

"Wait till you meet my patient," House replied.

* * *

Guy Talk

"House."

_"Busy!"_

"House."

_"What?"_

"Stop."

_"No."_

"Patient."

_"Cuddy?"_

"Consult."

_"Cuddy."_

"Interesting case."

_"Busy."_

"Are not."

_"Juggling."_

"I see."

_"Distraction."_

"Upset?"

_"Cameron."_

"Again?"

_"Eternally."_

"She's hot."

_"Um, DUH."_

"Do her."

_"Trouble."_

"I would."

_"Married."_

"Divorcing!"

_"Mine."_

"Which?"

_"What?"_

"Her or me?"

_"Both."_

"Fine."

_"Fine."_

"Seriously."

_"Indeed."_

"Patient."

_"Still juggling."_

"Haemophiliac."

_"Boring."_

"Ow!"

_"Sorry."_

"That hurt!"

_"Hand slipped."_

"Stop juggling!"

_"Fine."_

"Done now?"

_"Patient?"_

"Clots."

_"Yeah?"_

"Embolism."

_"I'm listening."_

"You're juggling."

_"I multitask."_

"Teenager."

_"Hmm."_

"Also fever."

_"Tox screen?"_

"Clean."

_"Blood work?"_

"Ordinary."

_"For haemophilia."_

"Went without saying."

_"Interesting."_

"Ducklings?"

_"Coffee."_

"On it."

_"Wilson, wait."_

"What?"

_"Double Latte."_

"Fuck you."

_"You wish."_


	17. Discworld and Good Omens: Shortfics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of Discworld shortfics; some were written for charitable fundraising.

naatz: Death of Rats, being visible to felines.

Death of Rats slid down the curtains and dashed across the floor, sidestepping a chair that the cat pursuing him ran directly into. 

SNH. SNH. SNH.

"What is WRONG with that cat?" the woman of the house asked, annoyed.

"Don't cats act strange before natural disasters?" her husband replied. 

"I hope that's not it."

A natural disaster was coming, all right. Death of Rats knew that much. Just not for the humans, unless their cat qualified as one.

There was a knock on the door.

"That's the exterminator," the woman said. "I called about our little..." she lowered her voice to a whisper, "rat problem."

***

chriek: Discworld: Archchancellor Ridcully and Science

"It's new," Ponder Stibbons said. This was both the best and the worst thing to say to the Archchancellor; Ridcully liked new things, but he also had certain....deep-rooted beliefs.

"Growin' tomatoes with teeth in a glass case? I should say so," Ridcully answered. In the background, Ponder could see Vimes trying not to laugh. 

"We think, thur, that with the help of Unseen University we could expand our research considerably," Igor said. 

"What is 'science' exactly?" Ridcully asked. Ponder cleared his throat. 

"Well..."

"You give uth money," Igor said, "And we make things explode."

There was a tense moment.

"Jolly good!" said Ridcully cheerfully.

* * *

vimeslady

Havelock Vetinari found his way around Pseudopolis Yard with uncanny intuition. He seemed to know where everything was, though he couldn't have been in the building more than two or three times. He made his way without instruction to the basement hospital where His Grace was propped up in bed, his face and lips pale white but his voice animated as he read to the infant child sitting on his lap. Vetinari sat calmly at the foot of the bed and did paperwork until Vimes finished, and the child was fast asleep.

"Good evening, Commander," he said, still looking at a sheet of paper. "I see William de Worde has chronicled your exploits with his usual...flair."

"Rot, all of it," Vimes said. He scratched the bandage on the side of his neck. 

"Commander, I really must begin to protest," Vetinari said, shuffling his papers into a single pile. "Sybil is most insistent that you cease these near-misses with death -- "

"Listen, they shot me instead of you, I should think you would bloody well be grateful," Vimes said, scowling. Vetinari cocked his head.

"I have at no point asked you to take a crossbow bolt for me, Commander Vimes."

"You never had to. The point of paying a Commander of the Watch is that you don't have to _ask someone._ You just pay them to do it," Vimes retorted. 

"If I pay you, I have no call to be grateful," Vetinari pointed out smoothly. 

"Are you even -- _satisfied_ I'm alive? I won't bid you up to happy," Vimes growled. 

"Most satisfied," Vetinari said, standing and walking to where Vimes lay on the pillows. "One might almost say pleased."

Vimes snorted, but Vetinari silenced his indignation with a cool, brief kiss on his forehead.

"You and I understand each other, Sir Samuel," he said quietly. Vimes looked up at him, keen eyes burning in his pale face. "We both know that you would have stood in front of those crossbows for no pay at all, and that the callow thanks of a politician would never be enough for you. Not from my lips."

Vimes smiled, then, and closed his eyes. "That's all right, then," he murmured. 

"As it always is, Sir Samuel. When you are well, we will speak again," Vetinari promised, but Vimes was already asleep.

* * *

vimeslady: **NOTE: Spoilers for the end of Going Postal.** I don't like the fact that, at the end of Going Postal, Vetinari offers Gilt the option of managing the A-M Mint. I also don't like the fact that, given the choice, Gilt apparently chose death.

"May I ask you a question, my lord?" Drumknott said. 

Vetinari looked up at him, eyebrows raised. Drumknott normally simply asked; he rarely preambled, which was why Vetinari had picked him out of the warren of clerks available to him in the Palace. In addition, it had been something of a long day and Drumknott knew better than to try his patience. 

"Is it of an impertinent nature?" Vetinari inquired. Drumknott seemed to consider it. 

"I think so, my lord," he said finally. 

"Very well; forewarned is forarmed. What is it?" 

Drumknott cleared his throat. "Mr. Gilt, sir." 

"Yes?" 

"He was a killer, sir." 

"Indeed." 

"And while you are, my lord, known for your appreciation of certain forms of ruthlessness..." 

"Very tactful of you, Drumknott," Vetinari murmured. 

"(Thank you, my lord.)...you are not generally given to putting psychopaths in charge of major government undertakings." 

Vetinari leaned back in his chair and tapped the nib of his quill on the desk's blotter, thoughtfully. 

"I believe it is important for people to have choices," he said. "People like to have choices. It doesn't matter what they are so much as long as they exist. I felt it was only fair to offer Gilt the choice." 

"But...?" Drumknott asked. 

"But just because people have a choice does not mean they will choose correctly. In fact in many cases it is easy to predict that they will choose incorrectly because they do not understand the...concrete nature of their choices. It is not my job to warn them that they are about to be stupid. It is merely my job to offer the choice." 

Drumknott smiled. "You knew what he would choose. It was never really an offer at all." 

"It was most certainly an offer," Vetinari said, but there was a hint of a smile in return. "And now, to other matters. Ah yes, I see the teakettle budget for the Watch House is up for review..."

* * *

**Blue - Eyed Boy**

Havelock's eyes, as a child, were more than simply blue; they were startlingly blue, like falling into new snow. There was an intelligence about them which only grew hooded, rather than disappearing, as he entered school. 

Havelock was first generation. His father hadn't been an Assassin. The father whose money had paid for his schooling, anyhow.

He stood over the former Patrician, Lord Snapcase, cleaning his blade. Snapcase's eyes stared at nothing. 

His eyes were startlingly blue. 

His eyes had never bothered to look back at Havelock's mother. 

"How do you like your blue-eyed boy now?" he asked softly.

* * *

**Out On A Limb**

"But it's a proven fact!" Ponder wailed. "You've seen Great A'Tuin yourself!"

Rincewind held up a hand, which wavered gently. 

"S'right. S'right. But. Suppose. Just, suppose. Right? That the world does, right, NOT rest on the back of a giant tortoise."

"But WHY?" Ponder asked. Ponder, when drinking with Rincewind, often became needlessly agitated. He was a Nervous Drunk. A nervous everything, really.

"For...argument's sake," Rincewind replied, vaguely. "And say it spun...y'know...around...the sun..."

"Daft. Everything'd fall off everything else," Ponder exclaimed. "Like...er..."

He watched as Rincewind gently toppled off his barstool.

"...you," he said sadly.

* * *

**Shiny**

"Well. He's nobility." Gunilla had said. "They like...drink? Horses? Shiny things."

Sacharissa, who could spell subtlety but never really grasped it, used Cheri Littlebottom's dressmaker. William, pacing the darkened office, didn't notice. 

"It's all there. The Great Morporkian Novel. The idea and all."

"I thought you didn't write lies," Sacharissa replied.

"Well, when the muse strikes, you don't question. Besides, it's almost the truth. But I can't write! I should be writing -- "

Sacharissa grabbed him by the collar and kissed him. 

"Ooh," he said. His eyes drifted downward. "Shiny."

He forever associated their first kiss with the second time she slapped him.

* * *

**Badge**

Vetinari had, as a peace offering after some irritation that Vimes no longer recalled, ordered new Watch badges. They were nicer than the old ones, shiny and durable. They were the symbol of the new Watch. 

He looked at the older, simpler badge on his desk. Sybil was always saying it was time for something new; perhaps she was right, but he couldn't replace the old one. It'd been given to him for as long as he was a copper. 

Whenever he thought about trading it in, #177 or not, he remembered that this was the badge he'd carried before.

* * *

**Ability**

It was not generally acknowledged by the Assassins that Havelock Vetinari was an accomplished edificeer. Mainly because it didn't need to be. It was the theory of inverse plaque size; the more famous your victim, the smaller your name-plaque under their portrait in the hall, because, well, everyone already knew. 

Ivy, they said, was deceptively difficult to climb because most ivy was not firmly anchored to the wall, and wasn't very durable to begin with. In his seventh year, Vetinari had supposedly scaled the infamous Ivy Wall on the south side of the Palace; eight floors of pure vegetation, slick, bug-infested, and impossible to climb. How did it support his weight? the other students asked. Sure, he's a skinny little bastard, but even a first-year would have trouble not tearing off leaves.

Vetinari just smiled, and made a mental note to remove the camoflagued ropes he'd lowered down among the ivy, later. 

After all, it wasn't the ability that counted, in politics, it was the appearance, and young Havelock was planning on being a very good politician indeed.

* * *

**Juxtapose**

It wasn't that Sam and Havelock were opposites, Sybil reflected; if that had been the case, Sam would have been just as exquisitely emotionless and composed as Havelock, because in order to be opposite a certain amount of symmetry had to be maintained. Or so Detritus had told her, on one of his Cold days. 

No, they were too different to be opposites. Havelock was pale, like a marble statue, and dark-haired; Sam had tanned skin and hair slowly going from dust-brown to ash-grey; he was the sort to have scrawled naughty sayings on statues at some point in his delinquent past. 

Still, though asymmetrical, they made a striking portrait; Sam, uncomfortably, holding his son on his lap, while Vetinari examined the boy, head bent, with an almost calculating expression on his face. After all, godfathering was a serious business. Havelock was investigating everything thoroughly first.

The juxtaposition between what her husband would give his son and what the Patrician could teach him was an eerie one; perhaps she'd been wrong to invite Havelock to tea. 

Then young Sam cheerfully threw up on the Patrician's robes. 

Trust a Vimes to put things in proper perspective.

* * *

**Equal Rights**

"We've a Witch on the force now, you know," Carrot said. "It's only equal rights."

Vimes, next to him, was glowering. Vetinari steepled his fingers. 

"This witch. Lance-Constable Ogg?"

"Yessir."

"Is Ms. Ogg in the habit of eating young children?" he asked.

Carrot shifted uncomfortably. "No, sir, but her Gran, Nanny Ogg, does have a bit of a stare -- "

"But she doesn't lure children into her house with promises of sweets? For the purpose of eating them?"

"I don't think so, sir. She just likes children, sir."

"But not in any gastronomic capacity."

"No, sir."

Vetinari nodded. "So our Lance-Constable doesn't consume, in any form, the youth of Ankh-Morpork."

"No, sir."

"And this new recruit, Lance-Constable Bunny -- "

"Chocolate Bunny, sir. I just think it's important if we have someone from the magical comestibles community as well as the magical baking community, sir."

"And the fact that he might melt in the daylight?"

"Night duty, sir."

Vetinari sighed. Times like this tried mens' souls. He nodded at Vimes, who rolled his eyes.

"Right," Vimes said. "Swear him in. And put out a memo saying nobody's to nibble his ears."

* * *

**Inhuman Rights**

"This is police discrimination!" the man cried. "And I won't stand for it!"

Sir Samuel Vimes, who once in a while worried about how bland he'd grown over people shouting in his office, looked up from his paperwork. "Are you lodging a formal complaint, Mr...?"

"Nichlaus!"

Vimes smiled. It was a smile he had learned from Vetinari, and it was terrifying. "I see. What is your complaint, Mr. Nichlaus?"

"I'm bein' discriminated against! You lot have no respect for the rights of nonhumans!"

"Nonhumans?"

"M'a werewolf," Nichlaus said, sulkily. "I've been mistreated!"

"Have you now? By whom?"

"That rock and that woman and that other rock! Police brutality, I call it!"

Vimes set down his pen. "Sergeants Detritus, Angua, and Dorfl, it would appear?"

"Those're the ones!"

Vimes' smile widened. 

"Congratulations, Mr. Nichlaus," he said. "You have officially been brutalised entirely by nonhumans. I'm sure they respect your right not to fall down any stairs, don't they, Detritus?"

Detritus' craggy grin matched his commander's. "Right you are, sir," he said, taking custody once more of the flabbergasted Nichlaus.

* * *

**Labyrinth**

Angua'd had the nightmare since she was a child.

Trapped in a labyrinth; the goal wasn't escape, but just to find the centre. She could see it, filled with fruit trees one never saw in Uberwald. Find it before the wolf at her heels got her. Until she left Uberwald she never succeeded.

Carrot and his unconditional love helped. Most of the time, she found the centre, though the wolf snapped and snarled at her. Still, she was safe, and could eat fruit, and be human.

But there was still the chase, and the labyrinth walls.

Then one day she was working in the canteen when Vimes entered, poured himself some tea, and sat, rubbing his eyes. She knew the gesture; she usually knew what caused it, too.

"Got four people on the Turnwise Street fire," she said. "I've reworked the rotas and got Detritus to growl at insubordinates."

Vimes gave her a grateful grin. "Angua, I often wonder what I'd do without you."

"Carrot and I -- "

"Not Carrot and you, you're not the same person. I meant you," he corrected. Something warm blossomed inside her. 

That night she dreamed the walls fell in on the wolf, and the fruit trees spread out across the wreckage.

* * *

**Dominoes**

Sam Vimes was not a man who enjoyed complicated games. It took him a good run-up for anything more involved than checkers. He was rather keen on dominos, however. Carrot knew this, and he'd mentioned it once, unwisely in Vimes' opinion, but on rainy days it wasn't so bad to have a bit of a game in the canteen.

The playing piece clicked. Vimes looked satisfied. "All right, it's your turn."

It was a tough choice. There were several _available_ moves, but the question was, which one did you choose? Could you think ahead and outwit your opponent? The strategy! The agony!

"Ook."

* * *

**Bet**

Out in the cosmos, bigger than life and twice as patient, soars Great A'Tuin, the star turtle. There are so many questions -- what does A'Tuin eat? What is A'Tuin's gender? What about A'Tuin's sex-life? For a world that stands on A'Tuin's back, this is an important consideration.

Even if the question was academic, humans would wonder. Orang-otans presumably care; they're not far removed from humans. 

The Librarian eyed Carrot and Vimes over the check-out desk, suspiciously. "Ook?"

"Er..." Vimes said. "It's to settle a bet."

"We'd be most appreciative," Carrot added.

The Librarian sighed and made a gesture that vaguely implied that some things, not even books can teach us. The watchmen wandered off, still debating, and the Librarian went to make sure the Big Book Of Chelonian Reproduction was still under lock and key. 

It'd only bother them if they knew. And Commander Vimes hated to lose bets.

* * *

**The Rules of Latatian**

Sybil Vimes-Ramkin had never marked her husband as an avid reader, but he plowed through books the same way he solved cases -- methodically, stubbornly, and constantly. 

"Sam, what's the book you're reading?"

"Oh, I don't know," Sam said idly, glancing up at his wife. "It was sitting out. I liked the cover."

"It's in Latatian."

"What's wrong with Latatian?"

"Well," Sybil said, "it's not something you translate in your head. You have a dictionary and notes."

"I like it. It's got rules. Got to have rules, if you want to learn anything."

Sybil looked at her husband, curious. "You cold-read Latatian because it has rules?"

"Long as you remember the rules, you're fine."

Vimes gave his wife a small smile, and returned to his book with an easy mind.

* * *

**Surprise**

Lady Sybil Ramkin was an organiser. 

You couldn't be slack when it came to breeding dragons, or you soon found yourself literally at ground zero. She kept her corner of the world neat, inasmuch as was possible when you spent half your time trying to stabilise a few dozen walking chemical disasters and the other half married to Sam Vimes.

Sam was a dis-organiser. Chaos followed him about like a puppy. Sybil treated it like a bad habit, akin to leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor. 

He kept order in the Watch, but that was a self-regimenting system. The Sergeants kept the Corporals in place, who made sure the Lance-Corporals weren't skiving off, who showed they were Corporal material by bossing the Constables, who dumped on the Lance-Constables (who made their own entertainment, apparently). 

But personally, vis-a-vis the universe, Sam Vimes was karmically Untidy. So she rarely told him when she was arranging certain things, which is why Sam didn't find out he was having a birthday party until it happened.

"Oh dear," she said. "It's a good thing we caught you by surprise, Sam."

"If you hadn't, I'd have shot Ridcully instead of his hat," Vimes sighed. "Please, Sybil. Don't surprise me."

"Please, Sybil," Mustrum Ridcully agreed, "Don't surprise him. My hat can't handle it."

* * *

**Stand Up**

"So let me get this straight," Vimes said slowly. "You're going to go down to the pub..."

"....right," came a voice, from somewhere underneath yards of chiffon.

"Dressed like a woman..."

"Yessir," the voice answered, as the unlikely face of Nobby Nobbs appeared in what Vimes hoped was the right part of the strangely filmy contraption. "On account of, they aren't likely to throw anything at a woman, are they, sir?"

Vimes looked dubious. "And once you've got their attention you're going to..."

"Tell them jokes, sir."

"He does tell a very good joke, sir," Sergeant Colon put in. "And much more appropriate than telling 'em in mixed company, Commander."

"I think the Mended Drum is about as mixed as one can get, personally," Vimes sighed. "You're just going to be a....a stand-up comedian?"

"Yessir, only don't worry sir. I won't let on who I really am," Nobby answered, nicking some of Cheri's lipstick. Vimes made a mental note to warn Cheri not to use it again. That was only one degree away from kissing Nobby Nobbs, which made even his own lips want to run away from his face. 

"He's going to use a stage name," Colon informed Vimes sagely.

"Beti," Nobby said, before Vimes could refuse to ask. 

"Beti?" Vimes asked, unable to stop himself.

"Yessir. Beti Wizzard, sir."

* * *

**Retired**

The Patrician had retired.

_The Patrician had retired._

Well, technically, Lord Vetinari had retired. The Patrician was a job, not a person, though this distinction was lost on the multitudes who had lived in Ankh-Morpork under what some might call his iron fist, for the past, oh, how long was it now? Thirty, forty years? Fifty? 

The Patrician had retired and there had been a new Patrician appointed. None of those doing the appointing even knew who he was; they had been too terrified of the last Patrician, or too wise to his tricks, to disagree with his decision regarding his successor. 

So it was with great anticipation on the part of Duke Vimes, and not a little fear on the part of the rest of the senior council, that the doors of the Palace were flung open so that they could enter and greet the new Patrician. 

A young man was lounging in the wooden chair at the foot of the steps up to the gold throne, idly reading a report, one leg hooked over an arm, the cap of office slightly askew on his short brown hair. 

He looked up.

Duke Vimes swore mightily.

"Hi dad," Viscount Vimes, Samuel the Second, said cheerfully. 

"Samuel," his father roared. 

"What? You keep telling me I should get a job..."

* * *

**Hogswatch Surprise**

Otto was very fond of the little demons in his iconograph box. He was kind to them, fed them promptly, and always kept them in paints; in return they were obedient and friendly, even if they weren't the brightest eels in the flashbox. 

William shook his head, of course, and Sacharissa gave him the dread Sacharissa's Lifted Eyebrow, but Otto didn't care; he spent hours at his workbench with a pair of scissors, thread, and dozens of tiny matchsticks, until his fingers were tender and his eyes sore from the work. 

It was worth it to hear the pleased squeaks and squeals of the little demons, when they woke that morning to a dozen delicate little paintbrushes, made with real vampire-hair, which was soft and downy and hard to come by. Each brush had a small black bow on it, of course, and a little tag attached. 

The cheerful legend on each tag read Happy Hogsvatch!

**2.13.04**

Aziraphale beamed at Crowley as they strolled out of the courthouse. 

"I like San Francisco," he announced. "And we just did a good thing. I knew the judges would see reason."

"This working together..." Crowley said. "Going rather well, I think."

"It's an Angel's duty to promote love," Aziraphale said. "It's -- "

" -- what you do," Crowley sighed.

"People should be allowed to get married. God loves everyone, you know."

Crowley rolled his eyes. "Spare me the rhetoric, Angel."

Aziraphale looked at him. "Why did you do it? Why'd you help me?"

Crowley grinned. "I'm looking forward to the increase in divorces."

* * *

**Four Horsemen**

"I told you," said War, with a smile, "it's time for a new look!"

I DO NOT NEED A NEW LOOK, Death replied, while a mortal plucked at his cowl and muttered "black is so last year". DEATH IS TIMELESS.

"Death might be," replied another one of the mortals, scrubbing a tarnished crown, "but black is outre. Pollution, what I want you to think about is eye contact. Don't be ashamed to be you!"

"I think red," announced the man tugging on the cowl. "Oh, look at you, bald is so sexy right now."

I'M NOT BALD, Death replied testily. 

"Sure, honey," answered yet another mortal, while he stared at War's horse. "War, darling, are you sure a horse is really _you?_ "

Another mortal appeared carrying two bottles of wine and a basket of food. "Now," he said to Famine, "I know you said you like finger-food, so we're going to make a platter of ribs, crab's legs, oysters -- lots of effort going into this meal."

Famine grinned. "I like it."

"Off with it, all of it," ordered the one now tugging on Death's entire robe. "We are going to put you in something that, you know, will flatter your attributes a bit more."

I AM DEATH. I HAVE NO ATTRIBUTES, Death insisted. 

War sighed. "I don't know if the world's ready for Queer Eye for the Anthropomorphic Guy," she said sadly.

"Nonsense," Carson replied.

"We've already got three of the Mortal Sins lined up for next week," Ted added, as he showed Famine how to crush the crab legs. 

I DON'T LIKE RED, Death complained.

* * *

**Iulius**

Caesar said he had a lean and hungry look, but Caesar was paranoid and mad; they said he wanted secretly to be emperor. 

Crowley had no problem with Iulius Caesar ascending to the throne of Rome, if only the bastard would do it already. Instead he seemed annoyingly content to keep the bloody place a Republic, and where was the fun in Republics? Nowhere, that's where!

Civil war would break out if Caesar died, or if he declared himself emperor. Crowley owed War a favour or two. He was only doing his job.

He leaned over Brutus' shoulder, and spoke softly in his ear.

"Iulius would be king, Brutus. Surely you don't want that. What will become of the Republic?"

Brutus could not see the flicker of a forked tongue, and Crowley wore a low-visored hat over his eyes. 

"What will become of the Republic," Brutus repeated, musingly. "What will become of the Republic if we kill him?"

"Leave that to me," Crowley replied. "Lean and hungry as I am."

And he laughed.

* * *

**Shaving**

"Angel..."

"Yes, Crowley?"

"Where are you?"

"I'm in here!"

Crowley followed the sound of running water to where Aziraphael stood in front of the sink of his flat's bathroom, half-dressed. 

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Shaving," Aziraphael replied calmly.

"Uh...why?"

"Makes me feel closer to humans."

"Angel, why would you want to feel closer to humans?"

Aziraphael drew the razor down his cheek, carefully, and then up the ticklish bit under his chin. 

"Because I can," he said.

"That's demonic-style reasoning."

"Sour apples grow next to sweet," Aziraphael said.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"We both came from the same place. I think really it's just that 'because I can' is angelic reasoning and you lot stole it from us."

Crowley found he didn't have a reply to that, so instead he squeezed some shaving gel into his palm, idly. 

"Slippery," he said. 

"It lathers," Aziraphael answered.

"I still don't -- "

Aziraphael cut him off with a shake of his head, wiping the last of the foam from his face with a towel.

"You don't have to understand it, Crowley," he said, with a small smile. Crowley felt something rather uncomfortable, deep in his sooty soul, if demons even had such a thing. 

"You really think it was angelic reasoning first?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then that might mean -- "

"Redemption is always on the table, Crowley," Aziraphael said. "You don't even have to ask. Just bring me a razor sometime."

Crowley nodded. "If I ever get the urge, I know who to come to."

Aziraphael pulled on a shirt and a jumper, and gave him a bright smile. "Now, shall we be off for the Ritz?"

* * *

**Tetris**

"I've got an apple," Crowley said. "It could help you out a lot."

Aziraphael, bent over an enormous ledger, looked over the edge of his glasses at Crowley. He didn't need glasses, of course, but they were the perfect prop in this kind of situation.

"Isn't that how all the trouble got started in the first place?" he asked, pointedly.

"Not that kind of apple! An Apple. A computer thingy. They do all kinds of things with computers these days. You could list your whole inventory with the push of a button."

"I know my whole inventory. What do I want to go pushing buttons for?"

"It's...fun?" Crowley asked. "Look, here..." 

He set a slim device on the counter, next to the ancient till, and opened it. Aziraphael looked unimpressed. 

"I am not to be tempted by apples," he said loftily. "As far as I know, Apple is the tool of Satan."

"I'm pretty sure that's Microsoft, actually."

"Well, we shall have to agree to disagree," Aziraphael said, poking one of the keys with his pencil. A picture appeared on the little screen.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Tetris," Crowley replied. An evil grin spread across his face. "Want to try it out...?"

* * *

**Cake**

"What is it?"

Crowley beamed at Aziraphael. This was disconcerting. Crowley was Too Cool To Smile.

"It's diabolical, is what," he replied. Aziraphael stared at the harmless-looking lump on the table in front of him.

"But what is it? I mean, it's a diabolical what?" he asked, prodding it with one finger. He expected at least the smell of sulfur. Instead it smelled vaguely...alcoholic. 

"What does it look like?" Crowley demanded.

"Sort of like a cake," Aziraphael answered. He licked the finger he'd poked it with. "Tastes rather like one too."

"It is!"

"That's hardly diabolical, Crowley. I mean I've see a great deal of diabolicity in my day, and this isn't it."

"It's a cake baked in rum. With candied fruit," Crowley said, now rather desperate. Aziraphael sliced it warily, and served himself a piece. He picked up a fork and sampled it.

"No," he said, "No, I really can't see the evil in it. It isn't baked with the blood of innocents or anything?"

"Rum," Crowley sulked.

"It tastes quite good," Aziraphael said consolingly. "You know what they ought to do? Give these for Christmas. It's a very cheery holiday sort of dish."

Crowley stared in horror, and then a grim smile spread over his face.

"Yes, Angel, that's exactly what they should do...."

* * *

**Next Year In...**

Crowley stood in the field, under the stars, and took off his sunglasses. 

Very little grew here now, but once it had been lush and lovely...once it had been Eden. 

"I thought I would find you here," Aziraphael said, his feet touching the ground gently, wings furling into nothing. He was better at landings than Crowley, but Crowley could drive above ten miles an hour, so they were even there. "Happy Creation, Crowley."

"Silly to pinpoint a day to the creation of everything ever, isn't it?"

"People like dates," Aziraphael replied.

"We're not people."

"And God made man in his image...."

"Sod off."

"Do you regret it?"

"Sod OFF, Angel."

"I was just asking," Aziraphael said, looking a little hurt. "I should think if you could tell anyone you could tell me." 

"You're the last person I could tell," Crowley said.

"Why?"

"Because we never tell anything but the truth, and that's a rotten habit to get into, and if you told me the truth then I couldn't lie to myself anymore."

"Why would you want to lie to yourself?" Aziraphael asked gently.

There was silence for a while. 

"Next year, same time?" Aziraphael asked. Crowley nodded. "One year, you'll answer."

"That's what I'm afraid of."

* * *

**Aziraphael Fell**

When he finally fell, as the best do, he fell the hardest. 

Aziraphael was six thousand years old and Adam was about twenty-two, but he was his father's son, and the child of an angel, even a fallen one, is part angel himself. Adam smiled and begged prettily, and Aziraphael fell.

Aziraphael fell, and his wings turned black and his joyful blue eyes hardened, though his smile was the same. Crowley hated that it was Adam who had tumbled Aziraphael from the heights, that it was Adam's mouth and hands Aziraphael had craved so much, but demons, especially newly-minted ones, are fickle. In time Aziraphael grew bored with a twenty-four-year-old mortal, and sought out Crowley. 

Crowley had no warning, really, just the sudden wall against his back and the hot, hard kiss against his mouth, Aziraphael's hips grinding into his own. Aziraphael, who could sear to the bone with a look from those flinty blue eyes. 

"Let's set the world on fire," Aziraphael said into his neck, pushing him hard against the wall. 

"Armageddon?" Crowley inquired, fingernails raking down Aziraphael's bare shoulders.

"Yes," Aziraphael hissed.

And Crowley thought that perhaps Adam had managed to bring about the end of the world after all....

But that was several weeks ago. 

"Let's fill the world's eyes with smoke," Aziraphael suggested, one hand sliding smoothly over Crowley's belly.

"Armageddon," Crowley agreed, cradling Aziraphael's head against his cheek.

"Right after this," Aziraphael said.

"And perhaps lunch at the Ritz?"

"Mmm."

"There's always tomorrow to end the world."

Crowley reckoned as long as nobody closed down the Ritz, the world was pretty much safe.

ariastar: Aziraphael meets Sherlock Holmes.

"It's the only copy in England," Holmes said as they stepped into the bookshop. "I doubt he'll part with it easily."

"But why is this book so important?" Watson asked.

"It is the foremost explication on medieval deductive methods. Good morning," Holmes said. "Mr. Fell, I take it."

"Mr. Holmes," Fell said, smiling from behind the till. "A pleasure to have you in my shop, sir."

"Your reputation precedes you," Watson murmured.

"I should like to purchase a book you possess," Holmes said promptly. "Price is very little issue."

Aziraphael smiled. "Of course. Won't you have tea first?"

Holmes never did get his hands on that book.


	18. Shortfics: Lord Peter Wimsey and Sherlock Holmes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are short fics set in the Lord Peter Wimsey and Sherlock Holmes universe. Some were written for charitable fundraising drives.

maeritrae: Captain Jack Sparrow meets Lord Peter Wimsey.

When he was nine, Peter developed a cough that worried his mother enough to take him to Port Royal for a few months to recover. He did so speedily; Peter loved the warm Caribbean air and exploring the countryside. 

He found himself, one day, sitting with an elderly man who had dreadlocked white hair and a pirate's swagger.

"Once I was young like you," the man said nostalgically. "Captain of the Black Pearl, I was, terror of the seas."

"Are you still a pirate?" asked the sleek-haired little boy. The man laughed.

"No! I'm a legend. Lad, shake hands with _Captain_ Jack Sparrow."

***

timetiger: Lord Peter, something about the Great War.

They didn't come together very often, especially now that most of them were married, but when they did, they tried to tell happy stories, to stave off the memory a bit.

"Do you remember the time we got cut off from the supply line?" Gensen asked.

"Which one?" Lord Peter inquired.

"The time we heard about the greenhouse a mile off -- "

"Right! And Bunter and I ran along ahead shouting THERE WILL BE BANANAS!"

"A good time," Bunter agreed.

"We lost three though, coming back," one man said softly. "What were their names?"

Most of them cast about, until Lord Peter cleared his throat.

"Anders, Edly, and Young," he said.

That was what all the men liked about Lord Peter. He never forgot. 

***

celtmama:

"Mr. Bunter to see you, your grace," said the Duchess's personal attendant, curtseying.

"Show him in, Miranda," the Duchess replied, curiously. Mr. Bunter was shown into her sitting-room, and she laid down her book. Two of her cats immediately leapt up and began twining themselves around Bunter's ankles. 

"I thought it was your day off," she said.

"So it is, your grace," he answered. "I thought it best not to mix personal...grievances and the business off the house."

"What is it?" she asked, concerned. "Are you unhappy here? Please don't say you're resigning -- Peter is so much better since you've arrived, it's miraculous."

"Your grace, I feel..." Bunter cleared his throat. "I feel that the staff perhaps do not welcome my presence here. Normally I would have no trouble, as my duty is to see to Lord Peter, but there comes a time where my duties and theirs intersect, and I cannot do for his lordship all that should be done."

"I see."

"And there does come a time, your grace, when a man must..." Bunter looked agonised. "A man must feel he is living for himself, if you take my meaning."

"Peter must leave the house," she interpreted.

"Just so," Bunter said, looking relieved. "I've taken the liberty of locating an excellent flat in town..."

The Duchess smiled. "Bunter, these days you are the keeper of my son's soul. Do as you see fit. Consult me on the furnishings only, and Peter on the bookshelves."

Bunter smiled. "Thank you, your grace. I -- " he reddened, then swallowed. "I am completely devoted to your son and only wish to see to his well-being."

The Duchess took his hand in hers and patted it gently. "I know you are, Mr. Bunter. I would not trust my child to anyone less."

When Peter, with childlike glee, gave his first dinner-party in his new flat, only the Duke noticed that his wife had the audacity to wink at Bunter as he served the wine.

* * *

ooktavia: 

"Mr. Fell," said Lord Peter Wimsey, rising from his chair and shaking hands with his lunch companion. "Pleased to meet you."

"Yes! Finally," Mr. Fell replied, beaming. He seated himself and shook out the fine white linen napkin, filling his plate with finger sandwiches. Lord Peter sipped his tea. "Tell me, which side are we rooting for?"

"I'm officially neutral in this particular match," Lord Peter replied, as the batsman in the nearby cricket game hit the ball neatly between two of the fielders. "Yourself?"

Fell smiled to himself. "I always choose a side. These are ripping sandwiches."

"They do a proper tea here," Lord Peter agreed. "I thought it might put you in a good mood. Woo you into sellin' me that book you're so fond of not-quite-selling."

"Me, not sell a book? Lord Peter, I _am_ a bookseller," Mr. Fell said, looking hurt.

"That's what you claim," said a new voice, and a dark-haired man seated himself at their table without asking. "AJ Crowley, Esquire," he continued, offering his hand to Lord Peter. "I'm an old friend of Mr. Fell's."

"Solicitor, eh?" Peter inquired, gesturing for Mr. Crowley to help himself to some sandwiches. "Going to take my case? Help me win that pre-Gutenberg poetry book I must have for my collection?"

Mr. Crowley grinned at Mr. Fell. "Well, I suppose it would be rather entertaining to play Devil's Advocate this once..."

* * *

senneci:

Harriet Vane sighed. 

She was at a cricket match, and she didn't know why; her housemates had said it would be a scream, but she preferred studying to screaming. The company was good, but the crowd was less than ideal. 

The supposed reason that it was going to be a "scream" was that this was the annual Old Boys Match, where the current Oxford team went up against a scattered handful of alumni players from yesteryear. No doubt some of them were in good condition, like the shockheaded underfed batsman for the Old Boys, but others were pushing fifty and not playing quite up to their prime. She had heard someone mention to someone else that the blond man was Lord Peter someoneorother; shock-headed Peter, she thought with a smile. 

Just as she was drifting off into her own imagination, there was a loud crack and a startled shriek; Harriet ducked aside as the ball flew through the air and whistled past one ear. The golden blond boy of the Old Boys ran up, bat still in one hand.

"That was a lovely hit, I don't think! Are you quite all right?" he called. 

"Just fine, thank you," Harriet replied, as one of the other young women fished out the ball and threw it back. The young man -- well, older than her, but he couldn't be thirty-five yet -- caught it one handed, almost without looking. He was looking at her, instead, and Harriet became conscious of her wild windblown hair and the fact that she was the plain girl amongst the pretty ones. She had a brief glimpse of an unfortunately long nose and pale blue eyes, locked disconcertingly on hers, before he threw off a salute.

"Sorry!" he called, and jogged back to the field amidst shouts of "Stop flirting, Wimsey!" and "He hits them on purpose into the womens' seats!"

When questioned, years later, Peter still denied hitting the ball on purpose, but he did remember vividly a dark-browed, wild-haired young woman with an extremely good dodge-reflex.

* * *

bright_weavings

Lord Peter Wimsey was a peer and as such had a peer's systematic distaste for trade and business. He was an expert book-keeper and his interest in detective work kept him quite busy, but he could no more have been a shop clerk than he could have flown to the moon. It was not snobbery in Peter, as it was in so many; it was merely a consciousness that class boundaries existed, like them or not, and crossing them in such a manner would only bring pain down upon all concerned. In the course of his duties it was well and good, but why take a paying job from someone who really needed the money?

He was not certain, however, where he stood on the idea of craftsmanship or artistry. He liked art, though he was certainly no painter, nor a sculptor. He liked the theatre and the ballet, though he only attended when they were worth attending. And he loved music, which was what was currently causing him such pangs.

"If Shakespeare didn't write his own ruddy plays it's because Bacon had the same problem I have," he complained, head bent over his notations-book, to Bunter. "I wonder if one can hire a Shakespeare type to pose as one and thus deflect attention."

"If I may venture to say so, my lord, the compositions are quite adequate," Bunter replied. 

"Adequate. Hah! Never mind it; I don't know why I feel I ought to publish," Lord Peter replied. The sheet music lay before him, taunting him. He'd written the cantata and knew it to be good, but he was --

Well, in his deepest heart, he was afraid that it was not, and Lord Peter Wimsey never affixed his name to work that was not good.

Bunter, sensing his master's distress, quietly bundled up the music that night and sold it to a publisher of popular instrumental music, who himself sold a hundred copies in a week. Peter's pleasure at Death Bredon's fame as a composer knew no bounds, and Bunter was a happy man once more.

* * *

busaikko: 

Saint-George Wimsey, the Viscount of Duke's Denver and the heir to a sixteenth-generation peerage, tried to tell himself that this was just a phase. Lots of young men, who lived primarily in the company of other young men, had urges that it only seemed sensible to satisfy within, as it were, the community. 

Besides, you could do worse for company than Digory Kirke, who was clearly going to take a first in History and become a professor. He was quiet, discreet, kind, and understood Saint-George's distractable temper. Half the time Digory himself seemed to live in a different world, always scribbling his childrens' stories about some fantasy land where animals could talk.

Sometimes, when they lay in bed together, Saint-George's pale gold head cradled against Digory's chest, Digory told him stories too -- stories about a fair-haired prince and his adoring horse-groom. Saint-George always rewarded Digory's stories with kisses, as was proper. 

"Do you ever think you'll publish those stories you showed me, the nursery ones?" Saint-George asked him once.

"I shouldn't think so," Digory replied. "They're much too important to show to just anyone."

Saint-George, who would one day become Professor Kirke's welcome guest at his home in the country, was always pleased to hear some new story of Narnia.

* * *

polaris_starz: 

_Good king Wenceslas looked out  
On the feast of Stephen -- _

In those days it was not uncommon for charitable groups, bands of young poor children, and jolly-minded folk to go caroling at Christmastime, and Baker Street was no exception. Indeed, it seemed as though our fair lane was frequented often, as it boasted several generous landladies and had well-swept pavements. Our rooms were warmed by a bright fire and tea was laid on; there could have been nothing cosier. 

_Page and monarch, forth they went,  
Forth they went together..._

"I declare, Holmes, those voices sound rather familiar," I observed, rising to cross to the window. "Aren't those your Irregulars?"

"Is it?" Holmes asked, rising to stand behind me. "So it is. we had better have them up, don't you think?"

"Indeed. Can't have the rank and file dissatisfied," I replied with a laugh. 

_Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,  
You who now will bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing._

Holmes stopped me at the door as I went to summon Mrs. Hudson to let the Irregular inside and bring up tea and biscuits for them.

"Happy Christmas, Watson," he said, warmly. I smiled.

"Happy Christmas, Holmes," I replied. 

And all was well, if rather overrun with Irregulars, on Baker Street that day.

* * *

It was tradition, and had once probably been good tradition, to take officers for the military from the upper classes and the University boys. Bunter had seen five or six already in his three years as a Sergeant, and most of them didn't know arse from elbow. Oh, they were smart, but they weren't clever. They hadn't any cunning, didn't know how to scrounge, didn't know when to look the other way for the welfare of the men. 

He hadn't thought Wimsey would be any different; he certainly didn't look very impressive, rake-thin and chinless and ramrod-straight like all the others. But there was something in his eyes -- something a little more cunning, a little more clever. 

Wimsey was different. He could move with a feline silence, and there were times when Bunter saw the kind intellect disappear completely from those eyes. Then a wall descended and they looked snakelike, predatory and cool and completely without mercy. If he had ever turned those eyes on his soldiers, Bunter would have committed treason to protect the men, but he never did. And so Bunter did not worry about his men. 

Instead, he worried about Wimsey. 

***

adina_atl: Harriet and Bunter in Peter's absence (not sexual)

"I hate it when he goes off without me," Harriet said, picking at her breakfast. Bunter, shelving a pile of Peter's books nearby, made a soft noise. "Beg your pardon?" she asked. 

"Just agreeing with you, Lady Peter," he replied. 

"You hate it when he goes off without me?" she asked, smiling. Bunter turned and gave her a rare smile. 

"His absence makes itself felt," he said. 

"I just think it makes me seem like the good little wife, sitting at home, waiting for her boy to come home," she complained. Bunter frowned at her. 

"Oh no, your ladyship," he replied. "I'm certain no-one would think so." 

"Yes, well." She pushed her plate away and sighed. "Do you miss him?" 

Bunter seemed to have to consider this. 

"I wish I could -- be where he is, to help him in what needs to be done," he said finally. 

Harriet smiled. "Yes. That's it precisely." Then she pushed herself out of the chair. "Well, to our own work." 

"Indeed, Ladyship." 

***

jiapa: Peter interacting with his kids

In some circles, admittedly not ones Peter or Harriet cared to be a part of, Bredon Wimsey was described as the result of "hybrid vigour", with a sniff and a sneer. His father had married a commoner, and worse: a writer and freethinker who had once been on trial for murdering her lover. His father, though he had a good bloodline, was hardly better, a peculiar sort who came perilously close to working for a living as a consulting detective. 

Bredon was blissfully ignorant of these remarks for the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life, but sooner or later he was bound to hear them. It was a miracle his school friends hadn't said anything, but then Bredon was a popular and much-admired boy at Eton. 

"Father," he said, as Peter steered the Daimler (his newest) out onto the highway and began the pleasant drive to Talboys for summer hols, "do you regret anything you've done?" 

Peter looked at him, vaguely alarmed. "What's that, old man?" 

"Like marrying mum, or doing your detectiving." 

"Not in the least. Why on earth do you ask, Bredon?" 

Bredon studied his hands. "People say things, that's all." 

"Yes, they will do that." 

"Things about mum, I mean." 

Peter smiled. "They certainly will do _that_." 

"Don't you get angry?" 

"Why, do you?" 

"Yes. I heard one of my mate's older brothers say something..." Bredon shrugged. "If he'd been my size I'd have thrashed him." 

"That's very good of you, Bredon, but entirely unnecessary." Peter pulled the car over to the shoulder and put it in park, turning to regard his half-grown son soberly. Bredon waited obediently for the lesson he knew he was about to receive. 

"In this world you are capable of thought, speech, and action. Any one without the other two is the sign of an inferior mind. You will have to deal with a great many inferior minds, my son, because you are intelligent and -- so very much your mother's child," Peter added. Bredon flushed with pleasure. "It is a sign of your own character that you feel a desire for justice, and not a sense of shame." 

"But what am I to do when they talk rubbish about her? Or you?" 

Peter shrugged. "Piffle along, lad, piffle along and watch sharply. It's always worked for me." 

Bredon considered this in deep silence the whole way back to Talboys, but by the time they arrived he had a sunny smile for his brothers and a kiss on the cheek for his mum. 

"I have terrible news," Peter said to Harriet later that night, when they were alone. "Bredon's become a man." 

"Bother," Harriet replied, laughing. "Is he a good man, Peter?" 

"Yes. I rather think he is."

* * *

anon: Anything Sherlock Holmes would be great

Holmes had laid the trap, which meant it was crafted with a hunter's expertise. I, having seen the mechanics of it, did not expect that the metropolitan police would fall for it, but it is easy to scoff at the magician when one knows his tricks. 

What neither of us had counted on was the second trap Lestrade laid for Holmes, because Lestrade was not by nature a devious man. 

He and Holmes stood in front of the door to the cells, Holmes lounging against the wall, Lestrade facing him and propped against the opposite wall. 

"It was tidily done, Mr. Holmes," Lestrade said, looking tired and not a little broken. "I can't say as I regret your sending up four of my detectives for graft, as they were here before my time and nothing but a waste of departmental funds." 

"So I understand," Holmes replied, "Though it was not for your sake I did it, nor to antagonise the police." 

"Oh, nobody's saying you wished that," Lestrade replied. I, standing down the hallway a bit, eavesdropped shamelessly, knowing Holmes was aware of it and would run me off if necessary. "It's just now we're a bit shorthanded, and missing a few keen minds." 

"If I may assist as a consultant..." Holmes offered with a bow. 

"Mr. Holmes, I'll take you up on that," Lestrade replied, and Holmes looked up sharply. "For a six-month salary fee." 

"Lestrade, what are you talking about?" Holmes asked. 

"Hiring you, Mr. Holmes, as a consultant," Lestrade replied easily. "To train up four new detectives of your choice and run the new forensics lab we're gettin' up funding for." 

Holmes, always a man of his word, could hardly back down; and that was how Lestrade tricked Sherlock Holmes into donning the badge of the metropolitan police for six months. 

***

bedofbones: I'm taking a class right now on Sherlock Holmes and the scientific method. Something with Professor Moriarty, perhaps?

Moriarty sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers. 

Contrary to what his underlings believed, he lived fairly simply. There was no luxurious brocade, no fine china, no gilded ornamentation in his study. He did have a fine large writing desk and comfortable sofa, but he had no need of hedonistic luxury, not now. Let young men enjoy their baubles; he was approaching middle-age and had never really had any appreciation for such things. 

"This young scientist," he said to his secretary, who was standing nearby with a leather case in one hand. "The one who beats corpses to see how they bruise and is more interested in blood than wine. I would like you to have him watched." 

"Of course, sir." The secretary hesitated. "Easier to simply have him killed, sir, if you think him a threat." 

Moriarty laughed. "I think you underestimate both him and myself. No, I don't want him killed; I want him cultivated, and watching is the first step." 

"Cultivated?" the secretary asked curiously. 

"Yes. I shall give out his name in various quarters where people are in need of his services; what is it he called himself, a Consulting Detective? What a splendid title. If the time invested pays off, it will pay treble." Moriarty took out a cigarette and lit it, placing it in a long filter. 

"You wish to encourage his efforts? What if he begins to pursue you?" 

"Why do you think I have arranged this, dear boy?" Moriarty said, exhaling smoke. "The game is uninteresting without a partner. And even if he should win...I shall have had the pleasure of knowing I was his tutor." 

His secretary sighed. "As you wish, sir." 

"Thank you, Stamford. You may go." 

Note: Stamford is the young medical assistant who introduces Watson to Holmes in A Study In Scarlet.

* * *

**My Price**

Over the years, his accent had mellowed; the impact of intelligent, well-bred company was never lost on Mervyn Bunter. His intellect had sharpened because Lord Peter challenged it, and because Lord Peter didn't like stupid people and didn't want them in his employ. His skills with the camera were comparable to any professional photographer, especially in the area of fingerprinting, and Lord Peter had given him that, too -- he would never have been able to afford the equipment on his own salary, generous as it was.

Once, one of Lord Peter's acquaintances had (while Bunter was listening at the door for the proper moment to bring in the wine) offered Lord Peter six hundred pounds a year for Bunter, which was a three hundred pound rise in pay. The young Lord had looked baffled, and replied that he ought to ask Bunter himself. 

"You couldn't buy me away from Lord Peter," Bunter had said, when the man asked him in person. 

"Come, man, everyone has their price."

Bunter had looked gravely at him for a moment, and contemplated in his mind's eye an amiable face, pianist's fingers, and a library full of first-edition books. Finally, he spoke. 

"You couldn't pay me enough to buy another Lord Peter, sir, and he's my price."

* * *

**Centre Of Attention. G.**

"Oh dear," said Harriet Vane, known under alias as Lady Peter Wimsey, "I think Peter's feeling rather left out."

"Don't mind him, dear," the Dowager Duchess replied. "It's good for the character. Do go on with what you were saying."

Harriet glanced at Peter, who was indeed looking just the tiniest bit sullen, although clearly he was trying to hide it; it wasn't her fault, after all, that nobody who read mysteries cared as much about Lord Peter as they did about Harriet Vane.

When the first annual meeting of the Womens' Mystery Writers Of Great Britain (Harriet Vane, Guest of Honour) had dissolved, Peter brightened a little, and held her coat for her as she slipped into it.

"I thought you were marvelous," he said, earnestly.

"You thought they all should have been mooning over you," she replied, grinning at him as they stepped out into the crisp winter evening. 

"Nothing of the sort."

"Admit it, Peter, you were sulking."

"Well, a chap gets used to being the centre of attention in a roomful of intelligent women," he confessed. Peter wasn't a particularly expressive man, in public, but now he wrapped his arm around her waist, possessively. "But I was more proud of you, you know."

"Do you love me very much, Peter?" she asked, laughing. 

"I happen to," he replied gravely. "I would happily spend the rest of my life being ignored by women for you, Harriet."

She leaned closer, and sighed happily. "I do so enjoy your piffle, once in a while."

* * *

**Ascot Opening Day. PG**

_All the dukes and earls and peers are here;  
Everyone who should be here is here..._

Lord Peter Wimsey liked Ascot's opening day because he honestly liked horses; he could have done without the women, swanning about in oversized hats, and the men, talking conservative politics. He went in equal parts to see the races and please his mother, who asked very little of him, really, in the grand scheme of things. 

"Have you met her?" asked Freddy Eynsford-Hill as he dashed up to him just before the second race. He didn't bother saying hello, and Peter adjusted his monocle, leaning forward slightly.

"Met who?" he asked.

"That divine girl! There she is!"

Peter followed Freddy's gaze and his eyes lighted on a woman in one of the usual black and white dresses, unusually accented in red, standing near good old Higgins (who hadn't bothered with the usual pastel grey suit). 

"She's splendid, she is," Freddy said, and Peter smiled gently. "I gave her my wager ticket. I do hope seven wins."

"Seven?" Peter asked in alarm. "Freddy, did you wager on Dover?"

But Freddy was already off to join his newest love, and as the horses raced past Peter was suddenly intent on the Eynsford-Hills and their companions. Just as the last straggler passed, he saw the girl lean forward and shout, to the general shock and amazement, "Come on Dover! Move yer bloomin arse!" 

Caught by paroxysms of laughter, Peter managed to stumble over to where Freddy was standing.

"I think you've picked a winner after all," he said through his mirth. "Beware she doesn't run off without you!"

* * *

**Examination. PG**

The body was dead, which was a relief in some ways; Harriet could deal with dead bodies, and this one wasn't even bloody.

Peter's face was clinically detached, as it usually was when he was looking at something he desperately didn't want to look at; he was examining the boots, so she picked up the billfold from the nearby table and sorted through it, carefully handling it around the little silver fingerprint marks all over it. 

"Anything of interest?" Peter asked, working his way up the trousers. 

"Not really. Was there a reason Charles wanted us to look at this body?"

"He thinks I could handle it more discreetly than he. I thought you would appreciate the mystery it presents, from a writer's point of view."

She watched him straighten, and glance over at the face. A small frown curved the corner of his lips, and she slipped her hand into his, squeezing gently before returning to the billfold. 

"I'm glad I came along, then," she said.

"Me too," he replied, in the same even voice he might have remarked on a soup stain on the body's necktie. 

Harriet wasn't fooled. She rarely was, when it came to Peter, and she smiled a little over the billfold as he continued the examination.

* * *

**Keeping Track. PG-13**

They were neither without their demons, whatever the Dowager Duchess or Bunter wanted to believe about things; if it pleased Peter's mother to think that Harriet had cured Peter of his nerves, let her think it. Bunter, Harriet suspected, was merely happy that he got along so well with her. She liked him, really. He was precise without being fussy, proper without being snobbish. 

None of them knew Harriet very well though, certainly not as well as they knew Peter, and they weren't there when she woke dreaming she was still in prison, when she had the nightmares about the rope around her throat, and Peter's careless arm draped over her in sleep was the most comforting thing in the world. When Peter's eyes were a little wild sometimes, people saw her calm them; when she shivered inside on reading the accounts of murderesses in the paper, rarely did anyone see Peter's shoulder bump against hers, and his sidelong smile. 

"Don't I rather owe you an awful lot?" Peter said to her one day, curled up with a book nearby. She looked up from her writing desk. "If we were to be keeping track, I mean. I know we don't, but if we did."

"No," she said, returning to her writing. "If we were keeping track I'd say we both owe Bunter."

She liked hearing Peter laugh.


	19. Shortfics: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are short Studio 60 fanfics, mainly written for charity fundraising.

kit_maxel

"So? What's wrong with him?" Danny asked anxiously.

"Might be his funnybone," the doctor replied, examining Danny's pupils.

"I'm sorry, was that a joke?" Danny demanded. "My co-exec passed out in the middle of the show and you think that's funny?"

The doctor, whose name was something like House or Harse, looked up at him with piercing blue eyes.

"Do I ask you to write comedy while you're at the doctor's office?" he asked.

"What? No -- "

"But you're asking me to be a doctor when all I wanted to do was see a funny comedy show," House replied. "If I'm going to do double duty I want a cut of the action."

"You volunteered!"

"She _volunteered me_ ," House replied, jerking his head at the slim, pretty young woman who was taking Matt's pulse. 

"Just -- tell me what's wrong with him?" Danny pleaded. The doctor gave him a level look and put the flashlight down on the table.

"Low blood sugar," he replied. "Slap him awake and give him a big glass of orange juice, and get him a blood-glucose test in the morning."

"That's all?"

"Well, I could give you a diagnosis of cancer if that'd be more entertaining."

Next week, Danny asked Matt to write a script about a really brilliant, sarcastic, cold-hearted doctor who abused his patients mercilessly. A few months later, NBS decided to pick it up as a drama. And the rest, as they say, is history.

* * *

crazedcrusader

"Okay, let me just pitch this," Tom said, holding up his hands almost defensively.

"It's stupid," Simon said from the other end of the room.

"It's obvious," Harrie added.

"I like it already. Go," Matt pointed at Tom, who looked pleased. He'd only been on the show three weeks, not counting the two stand-in stints he'd done when Mikey got sick, and he was eager to impress the man who was clearly the head writer's golden boy. 

Tom didn't even remember what the pitch was now, only that Matt had said it had potential, and had then taken it, spent three hours on a computer, and turned around to give him something that only barely resembled his original idea but was much, much funnier. And he'd put Tom's name on it with his own.

Tom knew that Matt was chasing Harrie, everyone knew that but Harrie. At the same time, however, Matt was not averse to charming anyone who crossed his path and bedding members of the cast if it suited his mood. Tom never expected to be so easy that a six-page script would do the trick, but looking back he wasn't ashamed at how easily he'd fallen for Matt's wit. After all, it had slung him headlong into the confidences of Simon and Harrie, who made him one of the Big Three when he was really just the small funny kid from the midwest who occasionally went home with Matt Albie at the end of the night.

* * *

lilychick

Danny was a man who thought in weeks, rather than hours or years. A half-season was fourteen weeks long; there were two weeks off for Christmas, then another half-season with a big push for spring sweeps. It was no great adjustment to him to think in terms of pregnancy weeks, though it bewildered Matt (who'd never been very good at math). 

"So here's my thought," he said to Jordan, as they sat in the diner and she put away an enormous salad plus most of his garlic bread. 

"What's that?" she asked.

"You have forty weeks of pregnancy less thirteen, which is twenty-seven weeks. That's enough time for at least fifty-four dates."

"You're scheduling our dates twenty-seven weeks in advance?"

"Not counting childbirth classes and stuff," he said vaguely.

"Oh, screw natural childbirth," Jordan said. "I'm having lots of drugs."

"Well, that frees up a third date a week," he said. "I'm not unfamiliar with subconscious fear of commitment, so I think we should schedule them now. I've got a whole week free during the mid-February break, I want to take you to Boston."

She stared at him.

"How do you know we'll still be together in February? We're not even together _now_ ," she said.

Danny grinned.

"Don't worry about it," he said, and kissed her.

* * *

aimsleydale

"Tunes party tonight," Tom whispered to Harrie, who looked up at him and beamed.

"Really?" she asked, then leaned over to Jeannie. "Tunes party tonight."

"Awesome," Jeannie replied. "Someone tell Matt and Danny?"

"Got it," Tom said, sitting down at his makeup table. "Simon and me decided. The cast party tonight's going to be at La Casa, it'll be lame."

"I hate La Casa! Why are we partying there?" Samantha said.

"Some Network bigwigs are coming, Jordan wants to woo them," Tom said. 

"Cool," Samantha said. "I love blowing off the cast parties."

If anyone had lingered at Studio Sixty after the show, they would have seen a flurry of peculiar activity: Cal and Suzanne lowering a big white sheet from the flyspace, Simon wheeling out an old popcorn cart he'd scavenged from somewhere, Tom working with a laptop and a small projector while Matt and Danny and the other actors rolled an enormous washtub full of ice and beer bottles out from the catering room. As everyone settled into the audience with bowls of buttered popcorn and bottles of beer, Tom nodded at Cal and Cal shouted to Suzanne.

"HIT THE LIGHTS!"

The studio went dark for a second, and then Tom pressed a key on the laptop. The projector hummed to life and the screen was illuminated with the twenty-foot-tall image of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

"We will be starting tonight's showing of the Looney Tunes _ouevre_ with a classic personal favourite of mine," Tom announced. "Remember to turn off all cellphones and pagers..."

* * *

elucreh

"What's going on here?" Danny asked, putting his head in the doorway.

"Mockin' the hat," Matt replied. Danny nodded and disappeared. Suzanne, sitting on Matt's couch with a PDA in her hand, rolled her eyes.

"Now, where were we?" Matt asked, leaning on his desk.

"You were about to make some pithy remarks on the stylish qualities of felt," she replied. "And probably a couple of jokes about _Blossom._ "

She casually adjusted the tilt of the broad-brimmed bucket hat on her head. Matt crossed his arms.

"Mockery is serious business," he said.

"Yes, sir."

"Comedy isn't funny, you know."

"No, Mr. Albie."

Matt shuddered. "Don't call me that. Is Danny gone?"

Suzanne leaned back and looked out the door. "Looks like."

"Awesome."

In one swift movement Suzanne stood, cast aside the hat, and closed the self-locking door. Matt caught her around the waist and kissed the side of her neck.

"So, what's next week's decoy?" she asked, giggling as he pinned her tight against him. 

"I was thinking you could wear some funny shoes," he answered.


	20. Ouran High School Host Club: Short Fics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These are a series of short fics mainly written for charitable fundraising.

aura218

"Do you think Mori-senpai is enjoying the cosplay?" Haruhi asked, setting out a new tray of biscuits for Tamaki and his guests.

"Of course he is! Who wouldn't?" Tamaki asked, tickling one of her (for the moment, very pointy) ears. 

Across the room, Hunny and Mori were entertaining their guests, Hunny in pointy-ears like Haruhi and a red shirt with a little gold insignia on it. Tamaki, armed with a toy laser-gun, pointed it at Mori and pulled the trigger. A little red light appeared on the back of Mori's head.

Mori turned around, glowering, the ridges on his forehead turning the light into a spatter of bright red. 

"Klingons are immune to lasers," he said implacably. Hunny giggled and leapt onto Mori's lap.

"So are Volcanos!" he added.

" _Vulcans,_ " Tamaki muttered under his breath.

"Probably both," Haruhi said comfortingly, patting Tamaki's hand as Mori returned to glowering in-character and scratching at his makeup.

* * *

kannnichtfranz

Kyouya was not having a good day.

He pushed a key, and his computer went _bloop_. He had programmed it, on the first day he owned it, never to go _bloop_. He had programmed it never to make any noise at all unless an email had arrived or his stocks were dropping. And now it was going _bloop._

He tried to think of what could have happened to crash it, but nothing came to mind. He scrupulously ran adware detectors every week, defragged the hard drive once a month, and never downloaded anything from anyone he didn't know.

He rebooted the computer and tried again to open the internet browser; again he was met with the dread _bloop_. Finally, he opened the file manager and began to look around, ignoring the error messages that cropped up every three minutes like clockwork.

There, in a folder innocently labeled "documents", he found the problem. Two dozen video games, a handful of naughty internet movies, and three pirated copies of _O Holy Night_. 

"HIKARU! KAORU!" he yelled, and the twins popped their heads over the back of a couch. "You like games, eh?" he demanded, picking up a nearby grapefruit. "How about _dodgeball?_ "

Later that night, the twins still agreed that playing Tetris and Frogger on Kyouya's superfast computer was totally worth smelling like citrus for the rest of the week.

* * *

hlynna: Tamaki's no good very bad day

Tamaki Suoh was not having a good day. 

It was, in fact, terrible because he'd failed a math test he didn't even know they were having and hadn't studied for. He'd been out with Kyouya instead, discussing new plans for the first spring Host Club session and what costumes to wear. 

It might even have been horrible. His dog Antoinette had thrown up on his shoes -- he didn't mind the shoes, though they did still smell, but he was worried about Antoinette's diet. He loved his dog and hated to see her upset by anything. 

It was definitely no-good, because since he'd had to wear his PE sneakers all day he'd squeaked everywhere he went, which distracted him and everyone around him too. Which led to it being very bad, as he'd woken up Hunny with his squeaking and Hunny had cut the shoes right off his feet. He was lucky he hadn't lost a toe in the process. 

Yes, it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad -- 

"Senpai?" Haruhi asked, coming to sit next to Tamaki where he was sulking barefoot in one corner. "I heard what happened to your sneakers. I know a store near my apartment that sells French shoes, I can show you where if you like." 

\-- _wonderful day._

*** 

aidara: Kyouya getting high

It was an accident. Everyone knew that. It was nobody's fault, per se. 

All right, yes, everyone knew that Miyako was a stoner and most of the reason she came to Host Club was because she got the munchies when she smoked after class, but she always designated Haruhi and never caused a fuss, so what was the harm? Her expenditure in cake was negligible and she brought in revenue. But Kyouya knew that too. 

And perhaps nobody had told Kyouya that the brownies in the supply cupboard were a gift from Miyako for Haruhi, because Miyako was friendly and thought Haruhi might enjoy them. But Kyouya knew everything, so whose job would it have been to tell him, anyway? And who could have seen him take one as a pick-me-up snack after Host Club had ended for the day? Haruhi and Mori were putting away chairs and Hunny was seeing the last guests off and the twins were, well, the twins, and Tamaki was changing out of his cosplay for the week. 

Kyouya laughing was such a bizarre sound, so entirely unusual, that it brought Haruhi up short. 

"Tamaki-senpai," she called, because Kyouya was holding Tamaki's hat (furry, and with ear flaps; he'd been a Russian Tsar) and laughing uncontrollably. Tamaki came running out of the anteroom, his fluffy Russian trousers still on under his blue Ouran blazer, and Kyouya dropped the hat. He pointed at Tamaki and laughed until tears came to his eyes. 

"What's so funny?" Tamaki demanded. Behind Kyouya, the twins were holding up an empty plate with brownie crumbs stuck to it. Hunny's eyes widened. 

"Your -- your trousers..." Kyouya doubled over and clutched his ribs. 

"Kyouya-senpai, why don't you come with us," the twins said, appearing to be all concern. Haruhi had an instinct to stop them, but she ignored it -- what harm would the twins really do to Kyouya, who would be sober enough again soon? 

Kyouya giggled helplessly and allowed himself to be led away, which was how a photograph of him with nothing but a well-placed furry hat ended up on the Host Club website. 

The twins didn't come out of hiding for a week. 

***

sanura: an Ouran/HP crossover with contrasts of people with glasses in Slytherin and Gryffindor

Kyouya ignored the shouts of "Harry!" at first. He was just waiting for his train, as he had every morning since coming to England for the last of the summer holiday before University. He didn't even really register that someone was shouting until they tackled him around the waist. 

He turned around to see who was assaulting him and looked down into the face of a redheaded woman not much younger than he was. 

"Hello," he said. 

The girl blushed charmingly and released his waist, jerking backwards. 

"Sorry," she said. "I thought you were someone I knew. I -- " 

She shrieked as she tripped backwards over someone's luggage and fell to the ground, skinning both her elbows. Kyouya sighed, gave in to fate, and helped her up. 

Ten minutes later they were sitting in a cafe near the train station, and she was telling him about Harry, who had gone missing two weeks before. 

"He's really -- powerful, you know?" she said. "And when he walks into a room you can see him measuring everyone up. And he -- never used to, but now he seems to know everything about everyone, even when nobody will listen to him. He's got big plans. We're all just really worried about him." 

Kyouya looked at her thoughtfully over the dreck that the English called tea. 

"I'm certain he'll be all right," he said, and thought of Haruhi. 

***

kannnichtfranz: What would happen were Hikaru and Kaoru to meet Fred and George.

"Hikaru! Kaoru! Come over here!" 

The twins looked up as Tamaki gestured wildly at them. He was waving for them to join him in the little knot of students at the far end of the Hogwarts courtyard, where a tall young man with dark hair and a frizzy-haired young woman were standing. They strolled over at a leisurely pace, taking in the stangers with a measured expertise. The boy had a scar above his eyebrow; this must be Harru Potter, which meant that the girl was Harru Miony Granger. Ouran wasn't specifically a magical training school, but it gave a full education for its expensive tuition, and that included basic Charms, Transfiguration, Herbology, and Magical History. Harru Potter's fame had penetrated to Japan easily. 

When they reached the other students, however, Harru Potter stepped aside and Tamaki struck a pose, one hand indicating a pair of redheaded young men who had been standing behind Potter. 

"Hitachiin brothers, meet Oueasaly brothers!" 

Hikaru caught his breath and glanced at Kaoru. Standing in front of them were near mirror-images; oh, the Oueasaly brothers had longer noses and paler skin, but otherwise it was like looking at his own face. 

"Pleased to meet you," one of them said, in the odd, clipped tones of the English. "I'm Fred. That's George. Are you Hikaru or Kaoru?" 

Kaoru grinned. "Guess!" 

The other boys looked at each other. In unison, they pointed at Kaoru. "Kaoru Hitachiin?" 

"Oh bugger," Harru Potter said. "There's four of them." 

All four redheaded boys turned to him, sniffed, and then turned back to each other. 

"We have a lot to discuss," they said in perfect unison, then burst out laughing. 

"We are in so much trouble," Harru said to Tamaki. 

***

elucreh: Peter Wimsey and Kyouya: Collections

"I didn't think you liked fiction much, Kyouya-senpai," Haruhi said to Kyouya one day, when she caught him reading a novel in English. The cover was unmistakably lurid, a bloody outstretched hand lying on the rug at the bottom of an ironworked spiral staircase. 

"I like murder mysteries," Kyouya answered absently, turning a page. Haruhi grinned. 

"You like solving puzzles!" 

"Yes. I collect mysteries; I like this author in particular. I own all of hers. Some in first-edition." 

"What's that book about?" 

Kyouya closed the book and offered it to her. As she studied the back, he spoke. 

"A nobleman with nothing else to do spends his time solving crimes other people commit. He is...sensitive to mood, highly strung, afraid to come too close to people." 

Haruhi glanced up as Kyouya's voice changed. It wasn't a waver, precisely, but she could hear the shift in mental gears that it marked. 

"He's very European -- blond, pale-eyed, musical," Kyouya said. Haruhi followed his gaze, which had settled on Tamaki, leaning over the back of a sofa to compliment some girl drinking her tea. 

"I collect mysteries," Kyouya repeated. "I find them fascinating."


	21. Miscellaneous Shortfics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short fanfics in various fandoms, written as charity fundraisers.

dine: CSI:LV fic

Gil Grissom knew that there were plenty of people in the Las Vegas crime lab who thought he was oblivious. He was a scientist and he was trained to notice things, but he never got his paperwork in on time and he occasionally wasn't entirely in the moment when speaking with someone. That didn't mean he wasn't paying attention, it just meant that he had less processing speed than normal for social inanities because he was working on a tough case. 

He had never bothered to fix the problem, because it took energy that could be better dedicated to other things. He had discovered that if he acted naturally, then the sort of woman who was attracted to him would not be the sort to demand things he couldn't provide. 

He hadn't counted on Sara Sidle. 

It wasn't that she wanted things from him that she wouldn't get. That was what -- well, yes, upset him, if he was being honest. It was that she demanded he give things he could give and simply didn't want to, was afraid to. Many women had been in and out of his life over the years, but only Sara had told him, implicitly and explicitly, that he had to try harder, that she would not be content until he had stepped outside his comfort zone for her just as she'd stepped outside hers for him. 

He'd played a game and lost -- but in the end he had wanted to lose. And besides, losing, he still won his prize. 

"You're thinking so loudly I can hear you from here," she said, sipping orange juice at the counter in his kitchen. "Anything important?" 

"As it turns out, no," he said, and smiled. 

*** 

**CSI: Young Detectives**

Books. His whole life was books.

Greg liked books, and liked science, he always had; liked figuring things out by working backwards along a chain of reasoning, studying particles and strands and cells too small for the naked eye to see.

But when he was twelve someone, a doting uncle perhaps (Greg: golden son amongst twelve girl-cousins), had given him a Young Detective's Kit, a silly little toy that did, however, come with a dusting brush and a little packet of powder to dust for fingerprints with. He hadn't even thought about it for years, until he got the job in the crimelab in Vegas. 

And he saw Nick, who was cool, and Sara, who was smart, and Warrick, who really seemed to have it together, and Gil Grissom who was just, just, an awesome intellect, and suddenly books weren't enough anymore. 

"Yeah," Warrick said, one day after shift, over coffee. "You want to be a CSI, I'll show you how it's done."

And Greg smiled, and went home and dug out his Young Detective's Kit, and practiced dusting for prints the whole rest of the day.

* * *

**CSI: Pendulum**

He wasn't unknowable; Lady Heather had known too many men for that. He wasn't unfathomable; she wasn't afraid of depths. Gil wasn't even all that much of a mystery, because his mystery was that he was a mystery.

He did sometimes make her head hurt. 

But he was her release, as well; the pendulum didn't swing, with him, from dominant to submissive. She didn't have to be either. She could simply be.

"Do you know what I like best about us?" she asked, head resting on his chest, listening to his heart beat, even and precise as his science.

"No," he replied, and she liked that too; that he didn't try to crack wise. "What?"

"We don't need props," she said. "All the silly things the other men come here for."

"I don't come here for release," he replied, idly brushing her hair off her cheek.

"Oh no?"

"No. I come here because I like you," he answered. He did not ask whether she liked him or not. It was nice.

"I like you too," she replied.

* * *

mizstorge: Something amusing about Odysseus and Penelope for my long-suffering husband, who says heroes are never anything special to their families?

The list appeared for the first time about ten days after Odysseus arrived home. It wasn't actually a list written down anywhere until a little later, but there was no doubt in his mind that Penelope had a mental list at that point. 

"Darling," she said one morning, "I've been meaning to ask you." 

As if he'd just gone out for a three-day boar hunt, and not a ten-year war followed by a ten-year sea voyage. Still, he had missed her dreadfully and loved her dreadfully, so he smiled and said, "What's that, my own?" 

"Well, the cobblestones in the courtyard are getting a bit uneven and I was thinking perhaps it was time to re-pack the mortar." 

That was simple enough, and he could hire some lads to help him do it; he was still hale and hearty from his seafaring, after all. 

The problem was, after that, she thought there were some walls that could use replastering, and twenty years ago he _had_ promised to build her a little trellis in the garden, and certainly he agreed with her that it was not a woman's work to pull up the stump near the front entryway... 

Then, one day, she _did_ present him with a list. A list of little household chores that needed doing. Nothing large, except... 

"BLAST IT, WOMAN!" he shouted, after a long day spent trying to pull up that damn stump. "I AM A HERO OF THE TROJAN WAR! I'm a general! I spent ten damn years trying to get home to you!" 

Penelope smiled and brought him a cool drink from the fountain, and slipped her hand into his. 

"I know, my love," she said, kissing his cheek. 

Odysseus looked at the stump again. 

Well, it was a small thing, really.

* * *

**The Sitting: Augustus Caesar**

"How much longer must I sit here?" Augustus asked, and the sculptor shook his head.

"Just a little longer, your eminence," the artist answered, working his hammer and chisel quickly. "The nose is entirely the wrong shape."

"Well, we can't have that," Augustus grumbled. "I have a city to rule, though, you know that, don't you?"

The sculptor was silent, except for the almost metallic noise of chisel on marble. Finally he spoke.

"Sir, when you die, gods forbid, and are immortalised as the rule of all the world, what will you leave behind you?"

"Rome," Augustus answered. "And my children."

"And your name on the buidings of the Forum, sir," the sculptor said.

"Yes. So? Less talk, more carving."

"When I die, sir, your humble servant, I will leave behind you."

Augustus was suddenly still, even down to his formerly fidgeting fingers. 

"Me?"

"Yes sir. When men speak of the glory of Augustus Caesar, divi filium, two thousand years from now, they will speak of your accomplishments, sir. But they will look at my sculpture."

Augustus was silent for the rest of the sitting, unmoving except for the occasional dart of his eyes away from the target the sculptor had specified, following the quick, precise movements of the chisel.

* * *

**The Meal: Emperor Vespasian**

He really wasn't cut out for this.

He wasn't an imperial patrician, he wasn't much of a politician to start with, he was just a soldier who happened to have a head for management. 

Why?

Why on earth had he wanted to be Emperor? 

Vespasian bent over the new reports coming in from across the vast conglomeration of fractious, childish tribes known as the Roman Empire, the familiar anxiety of rule clenching his insides. 

A servant appeared and quietly placed a plate of food at his elbow. Servants were nice, but one didn't have to be an Emperor to have servants. Good food was nice, but again...

He turned to regard the plate, idly. A few slices of cheese, some fresh bread, and fruit; figs and berries besides.

The figs were from an eastern province, the cheese a recipe from Gaul; the berries were local, but the bread was a much-improved version they'd picked up in Germania.

Suddenly he laughed. This was why; this was Rome. Not one thing, but many things in one, making it more than the sum of its parts. He wanted to be remembered as a man who had been one of those parts.

The servants, sweeping the corridor outside Vespasian's study, smiled to hear him laugh.

* * *

**Paint the World: Shakespeare**

_(Pardon the liberties taken with the language.)_

"Aren't you tired of it?"

"Tired of what?" William asked, laying down his quill. 

"This. Slinging ink to page. Don't you want to be out in the world? Sometimes, if I spend another minute on that stage..."

William smiled. "I'm nearly sixty. I prefer a warm room, an endless supply of paper."

"To match your endless ideas."

"To fill with words," William said kindly. "I don't need the world. I paint my world with words."

He tapped the line he'd just penned. "As you from crimes would pardon'd be, let your indulgence set me free."

"I like that."

"As do I."

* * *

**Because: Hamlet**

Horatio was a well bred young man of Danish royalty, and would never have dreamed of interfering in his friend's affairs without being invited.

If he thought Hamlet, even before his father's death, was circling madness with his courting of Ophelia, who showed her true feelings one minute and her father's reserve the next, he never spoke of it to Hamlet. He hated Ophelia, without really knowing why at first; he hated the way she possessed his friend, not just that she had him but that she occupied his thoughts even when absent. 

"Don't you like her even a little?" Hamlet asked him, and since he had been asked, Horatio could answer. 

"Not even a nutshell's worth," he replied. 

"Why not?"

And Horatio had been waiting for that question above all others. Because he would speak if asked, and otherwise would be silent, and Hamlet had asked him.

"Because I love you," he said simply, and kissed Hamlet.

* * *

**History: Calm Acceptance**

The History Channel tells us that _on February 8, 1587, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded for treason. Her son, King James VI of Scotland, calmly accepted his mother's execution._

"Jamie, I'm going to kill your mother for treason," said Elizabeth.

James, King of Scotland, looked thoughtful.

"Can I have her room?" he asked.

**Eat: Nero Wolfe**

"You will sleep here, eat here, and work here," my new boss at the time said, which was just fine by me; I was happy to have a job, and this seemed like a plum job, as they went. Besides, employment for guys with just as much brains as brawn and a big mouth to prove it were few and far between at the time. Room and board included was a benefit. 

Until I met the board.

"What is it?" I asked, like the perishing neophyte I was. Wolfe said something in French, or what I assumed was French, and went back to eating. For all I know he could have just told me it was fried rat. I found out later it was squab, which isn't always any more reassuring, given the pigeons in New York. He stopped eating and looked at me again.

"Eat it," he said. 

"You know there's a deli down the street -- "

"Eat it, or Fritz will be insulted," he insisted. What was he, my pop? 

Still, I wasn't about to get thrown out of the first steady job in weeks, so I picked up a knife and cut off a little sliver and ate it. I didn't even realise he was watching me until he gave me a weird little smile.

"Good?" he asked.

I was too busy eating to reply.

* * *

**Blind: Daredevil/Spiderman**

The thing is, he's blind.

Some people know it and some people don't but nobody at all seems to grasp the significance of it, which is that he knows. He gets around in both worlds, and he's learned to recognise the others by their voices, so when he's introduced to them as someone else and they say hello...well, nobody bothers to hide their voice like they do their bodies -- like he does, under suits and dark glasses. 

Matt lives in a pure world, and nobody can hide from him there. They travel in much the same circles, after all; some of them are reporters who've covered his cases or friends, family of politicians. Bruce Wayne hired him once, for god's sake. He knows who Mr. Wayne, Mr. Kent, Mr. Parker are. He knows who Ms. Gordon is. 

But he hasn't told anyone, because he figures, well, it's like client privilege. Not that they're actually paying him -- except Mr. Wayne, briefly -- but he's kept other secrets before, and will again, and it's a breach of trust, isn't it. 

Peter knows who he is now, too, which is sort of a relief, because it means he doesn't have to be careful with Peter. A double-trust. And that leads to fellowship, and that leads to private thoughts that he would never let past his lips except that one night, some nights, Peter goes a little wild. Everyone does, with the not-telling, and Peter comes to Matt and says how do you handle it? 

And Matt says he thinks about trust, about not betraying the trust, and he makes some lame joke about the heroism that dare not speak its name. 

And there's this little choke from Peter, he wouldn't hear it if he wasn't so used to listening. He wonders how he can ever have thought Peter and Spider-man were similar, because Peter, the real Peter, sounds nothing like the man who climbs walls and saves damsels in distress. Matt knows what it means, that little choking noise, because he made it himself a while ago when he figured out a few things about life and love and sex. 

He drowns in sensation when they touch the first time and he's still drowning hours later while Peter sleeps, head pillowed on Matt's shoulder, hand on his chest. Matt takes the secret and folds it up into a little box like origami, and tucks it deep down with the other secrets, only a little more raw around the edges. 

Matt's used to keeping secrets, and he's finally found one he likes.

**Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Research is for the Faithless**

"We can't just dive into this," Cordelia said. "I'm a mortal. A gorgeous mortal, but a mortal. You aren't. You know bad things happen to people when -- "

"Scared?" A dangerous grin. 

"I've lived way too long in this town to die because I got freaky with the supernatural."

"Scared."

"I am not!" Cordelia snapped. "How dare you call me scared when I've been helping to battle evil even at the risk of getting bloodstains on my Prada! We need to do research!"

Faith licked her lips. 

Then she licked Cordelia's. 

"Research is for the faithless," she said huskily.

* * *

**Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Like That**

"Bet you used to take Xander here," Faith said around wet, open kisses as she pressed Cordelia against the door. 

"Shut up," Cordelia snarled, and bit Faith's lip. Faith bit back.

"Take them here when you're too embarrassed to be seen with them," Faith continued, hiking Cordelia's skirt up around her hips. 

"I said shut up," Cordelia answered, hands sliding under Faith's shirt. 

"To do naughty things in the dark," Faith continued, as one hand pulled the lightbulb's chain. In the darkness, Cordelia moaned.

"Just like that..."

* * *

**Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Dressing Room**

Buffy had tried to dress Willow, because it was a crime to see someone just as pretty as Cordelia being mocked by Cordelia for no other reason than her anthropologist mother was a little overbearing; Buffy had tried to dress Xander because Xander was hopeless. 

Everyone tried with Xander, sooner or later. Willow, like the good student she was, had taken and learned and absorbed the fashion lessons Buffy had to teach, and had decided to try her hand with Xander, even knowing what the result would be.

"This wasn't what I expected to be doing today," Xander said, into her neck. Willow giggled, pressed up against the wall of the dressing room, as she turned her head to see them in the mirror, Xander's broad hands on her hips, his lips pressing to her pulse.

"Me either," she answered. "You're just trying to get out of going shopping."

"And these pants," he said. "Do you mind?"

"No," she replied, to the infinity of Xanders and Willows reflected in the tri-fold mirror. "I don't mind at all..."

**Torchwood: Headcase**

Concussions are hardly unknown in their line of work; along with the gunshot wounds and the bruises and the occasional momentary death, it goes with the job. Though concussions are a little different, of course. Anyone can sit with you when you're at A&E with buckshot in your hip, after all.

Owen says that medical studies have proven you don't need to sit up with concussion patients anymore, but even coming from a distant future Jack has lived too long in the past to buy it. It is his job to stay with them, therefore, and Owen washes his hands of the whole situation.

Rhys is nice but kind of ineffective, so Jack makes Gwen stay with him at the Hub when she's been hit on the head. They sit in his office and don't talk much, since Gwen's high-strung enough not to drift off simply because she's sitting down. The silence is okay; sometimes if she asks he'll even answer questions he wouldn't at any other time.

For Tosh, he takes her up to the Plass and they stand at the rail and eat crisps (which are all she wants, anything else makes her nauseous) and let the cold keep her awake. He makes her teach him Japanese, mostly the dirty stuff. Tosh blushes, but her vocabulary is extensive and intriguing. Jack teaches her pick-up lines in alien languages and tells her it's love poetry. 

Owen keeps insisting he doesn't need to be sat-up-with, but Jack insists harder and when you're concussed there's only so much Jack you can take before it's overwhelming. So they sit on the sofa near the rolldoor and Jack pulls Owen's head down to his shoulder and tells him stories, as if Owen's a little kid, every one of which is true and none of which Owen believes.

(Except Owen doesn't get concussions anymore. Jack kind of misses it.)

And of course when he's had a severe head injury is the only time Ianto can't pull a bluff better than anyone else on the team, so Jack makes him play cards. Ianto sits in the conference-room chair, all hollows-under-eyes and lip-chewing youthfulness and sidelong looks, and Jack thinks it was one of his best ideas _ever_ to suggest strip-poker.


End file.
